College Board announced that there will be changes to the Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology curriculum for the 2024-2025 school year. The course does not have any set concepts since there is still information that is yet to be discovered, so it is growing with information almost every day as researchers find out more. Currently Jefferson has two teachers teaching AP Psychology: Melanie Morris and Teresa Hamrick.
Previously, the AP Psychology exam was based mostly on memorization and matching words with concepts. This made students focus less on how to read psychological studies and focus more on memorizing key words.
“They removed a lot of names, so it’s less about being able to match a name to something and more about understanding the something, so that is a really big change,” Hamrick said. “They took out some terminology and replaced it with newer terminology.”
Psychology is constantly evolving and growing, making it difficult to have a solid set curriculum.
“Psychology still rests a lot in theory so you can’t take it completely scientifically, it just doesn’t work,” Hamrick said.
Concepts from last year’s curriculum were still used for the new curriculum, however some of these concepts now have new terminology.
“They added contralateral ‘hemispheric organization’—the concept [is] not new, but the actual terminology is,” Morris said.
The curriculum now consists of five units instead of nine because College Board wanted to shift the focus of the course on the “five pillars” of psychology, the biological bases of behavior, cognition, development and learning, social psychology and mental and physical health. The AP exam also has more free response questions.
“The biggest change was the free response question,” Morris said. “It’s less content based and more skill based, so it’s about analysis and understanding how to read a psychological study and break it down.”
The American Psychological Association gave curriculum recommendations to College Board in 2022 for AP Psychology, and has been in development for the past two years.
“They haven’t done an update in [a long time], they wanted to make it more skill based and less memorization of facts,” Morris said.