Rogers schools add Capstone program

Advanced Placement initiative offers seminar, research classes over 2 years

ROGERS — An Advanced Placement program meant to develop students’ critical thinking, research and presentation skills has taken root in the school district.

Capstone is a two-part program with students taking Advanced Placement seminar one year and Advanced Placement research the next. Students receive the Advanced Placement capstone diploma if they earn scores of 3 or higher in both classes’ exams and four additional exams of their choosing, according to the College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program.

This is the first year the school district has offered Capstone. Twenty-four juniors and seniors are enrolled in one section of the seminar class. Heritage High School hosts the class, although nine students from Rogers High and one from New Technology High travel there to attend, said teacher Mary Parker.

Heritage will begin offering the research course next school year. Haas Hall Academy’s Fayetteville campus and Springdale’s Har-Ber High School are the only schools in Northwest Arkansas offering both Capstone courses this year.

Haas Hall’s Bentonville, Rogers and Springdale campuses started the process of becoming Capstone schools by offering the seminar this academic year. Each will offer the research class next school year, according to Haas Hall spokeswoman Kelly Barnett.

The College Board introduced Capstone in 2014 in response to feedback from higher education institutions. They want students better prepared for the kind of critical thinking, research and collaboration they need in college, according to Jerome White, director of media relations and external communications for the College Board.

“AP seminar and AP research are unique when compared to traditional AP subjects,” White wrote in an email. “The two courses are skills-based and content agnostic, meaning teachers focus instruction on research and collaboration skills while students choose personally motivating topics to demonstrate mastery of these skills.”

Fourteen Arkansas schools participated in the program last school year. The College Board estimates an additional four to six Arkansas schools have joined this school year, White said. More than 1,700 schools nationwide offer it, he said.

Students in Parker’s class were working in groups last week, trying to come up with a question that presents a problem they will attempt to answer in an essay.

Parker chose the students for each group, mixing them up by school and personality, she said.

“One of the standards of the class deals with learning to work in teams and evaluating your own strengths and weaknesses and that of the other people in the group,” she said.

Parker, who is primarily a French teacher, attended a weeklong training session in Massachusetts this summer to learn how to teach the seminar class. She is more of a facilitator than a teacher.

Sophia Kessler, 17, a Heritage senior, said she was drawn to the seminar class because she’d heard during college tours about the importance of research skills.

“We don’t really write papers like these in English or anything,” Kessler said. “So the class is very valuable for college.”

Gael Avalos, a Heritage senior, said writing assignments in other classes is comparatively easy.

“We get spoon-fed,” said Avalos, 17. “They give us the sources, they give us what to write. But here, we’ve got to find our own sources, and we’ve got to cite them properly.”

Both students said they’d recommend the course.

“If you’re college-bound, this course is a must,” Avalos said.

He said most of the students in the class belong to the Rogers Honors Academy, a district program designed to help high-performing students explore career choices and find the best colleges for them.

Advanced Placement courses are rigorous, college-level classes offered in high schools providing students an opportunity to earn college credit. In most cases, if students earn a certain score on the end-of-thecourse exam, which is graded on a 1-5 scale, they earn college credit.

The University of Arkansas offers students credit for successful scores on many Advanced Placement courses, ranging from art history to physics, but it does not provide credit for Capstone classes, said Suzanne McCray, the university’s vice provost for enrollment management and dean of admissions.

That, however, should not discourage participation in Capstone, McCray said. She equated it to a free college-prep program.

“Our studies indicate that students who have taken even one of these courses have a better understanding about how to engage in college, and they enjoy higher retention and graduation rates,” McCray wrote in an email.

Casey Reed, vice president of admissions at the University of Tulsa, said the university has a favorable view of the Capstone program. It’s one factor among many they use to evaluate applicants.

“We want to make sure students are challenging themselves based on their school offerings, so not just doing what’s required to graduate, but making sure they’re challenging themselves with college-prep course work,” Reed said.