An AP course in Human Geography emphasizes the importance of geography as a field of inquiry and briefly discusses the emergence of academic geography in nineteenth-century Europe. It shows how the discipline has evolved into the study of diverse peoples and areas organized around a set of concepts. This discussion of the evolution of the discipline helps students understand how human geography is related to the remainder of the field. Geographic concepts emphasized throughout the course are location, space, scale, pattern, regionalization, and place. These concepts are basic to students' understanding of spatial interaction and spatial behavior, the dynamics of human population growth and movement, patterns of culture, economic use of Earth, political organization of space, and human settlement patterns, particularly urbanization.
Students learn how to use and make maps.
They also learn to apply mathematical formulas, models, and qualitative data to geographical concepts. The course also makes use of the concept of the region, encourages students to consider the regional organization of various phenomena, and enables students to create regions in order to illustrate process. A significant outcome of the course is students' awareness of the relevance of academic geography to everyday life and decision making. This combination of the academic and the applied gives students a sophisticated view of the world and an understanding of the manifold applications of what they have learned in the course. Thus, many of the concepts and theories encountered in this part of the course crosscut with other course modules.