AVID students are taking 74 AP classes this year, compared with 52 last year. Other areas are science and foreign languages with six each and three students enrolled in AP Calculus. Dr. Archer believes students are taught to use a notebook to organize classroom materials. To facilitate this, students are taught how to organize and utilize a three-ring notebooks. Knowing how to make full use of a notebook helps students locate and retrieve class materials, organize materials for study, and transport materials to and from class.
Parents also benefit because the notebook can serve as a communication tool between home and school.
Parents can examine in-progress and completed work to gain a better idea of what their child is learning. The development began with a survey in which 556 middle-school teachers focused on school behaviors, organization skills, and learning strategies that they believed were necessary for success in their classrooms. Subsequently, the organization skills presented were introduced in more than 100 middle schools, junior high schools, and high schools. The students in these schools scored significantly higher in a post-test of skills taught in the program than the control district students. Both teachers and students at these schools indicated on questionnaires that they believed the organizational skills were important to school success.