hello ap seminar students i'm mrs minnick and i teach at lassiter high school in marietta georgia today we're going to go over some strategies and suggestions for part a of the end of course exam and ap seminar first let's take a minute to review the format of part a so this part is three short answer questions that focus on one source and that source is typically an article of some kind the suggested time for this part is 30 minutes but often students take maybe 40 or even 45 minutes on this part and they often find that they have plenty of time for part b so the ap exam and seminar is two hours total so you've got plenty of time for part b even if you take a little bit longer for part a and finally part a is worth 13.5 of your total ap seminar score before we talk about the specific questions if you're taking the ap seminar exam and administration one make sure to write all your responses in the answer booklet on the appropriate pages and in the appropriate sections so one way of making sure that you're doing this is looking for the watermarks that are clearly labeling each page question one um and then the next section is question question two and the next one is question three so just look for those watermarks the parts of eoca require additional analysis as you go along as you can see so question one asks you to identify the argument the keyword being identify question two is explain the line of reasoning and question three is evaluate the evidence so one important thing to consider or keep in mind as you complete part a is these key verbs because they speak to the objectives of each question okay let's talk a little bit about the rubric for part a for question one to score high you'll need to accurately describe all parts of the argument and demonstrate an understanding of the argument as a whole so be aware that the argument isn't just a restatement of the title of the text it's also not located in just one part of the article so for example we're not going to find the entire argument in the last sentence of the article so we need to look at the various parts of the text and consider and think through how they contribute to the overall argument there are a few things that we need to do in order to score high in question two the first step is to accurately identify most of the claims in the argument and let's pause for a second and just review the definition of a claim so a claim is a statement made by the author that asserts a perspective about a specific issue and sometimes i tell my students it's the statement of you know an assertion statement that the author is making but it seems like it's wanting something we need some evidence to feel really confident in that assertion statement so we're looking for those moments along the way so those specific claims um to score high in this question we also need to clearly explain how these claims relate to one another and this is part of the line of reasoning and i know you've heard this term throughout the year and you've talked about it so the line of reasoning isn't necessarily what the author says because that's a summary but it speaks more to how the author constructs the argument and then lastly for this question to score high we need to tie the claims back to the overall argument for question three we are asked to evaluate which means that we're sitting in the judge's seat so for this question we'll want to judge how well the evidence supports the argument in terms of credibility so how credible are the sources but also relevance which is how appropriate are the sources in supporting the author's claims don't forget relevance and in fact notice in the rubric that relevance is before credibility it's really important to consider we will also want to connect claims to evidence in this question so that's another part of scoring high so how does the evidence support the specific claim so not just how relevant and credible is the evidence but how well does it support the author's claims and we can you know if as we're thinking through this we can ask questions like which claims aren't supported by any evidence at all which claims are supported by evidence and so those questions might help us in our evaluation okay let's talk to um speak to some possible approaches to part a so one idea to consider is writing questions two and three before question one after we've engaged with the claims and the evidence at a high level we're more likely to identify all parts of the argument in question one another approach like we talked about is just to allow yourself enough time 40 to 45 minutes is perfectly fine for part a remember the objective of each question by the verbs identify explain evaluate because those tell you what to do you also may have an article that omits certain sections and these omitted parts are indicated with an ellipsis so dot dot dot when you see those or if you see those don't consider our guess at what might have been omitted it's not relevant just don't consider it only use the content provided for you and finally use your good reading strategies that you've been practicing this year so consider the title because the title is going to tell us essentially what the article is about it's not going to tell us the argument but it is going to give us the scope we also might want to read the first and last paragraphs to kind of see where the author is headed and then another really good strategy is to mark up the text which we're going to talk about a little bit more in a minute okay so let's let's go through some tips for answering each question specifically so for question one identifying the argument this response should be about one to two focused sentences so it's short but it's thorough look at the structure of the text to determine all parts of the argument chances are your text will present a complex argument that has more than one key component so look at where the author transitions so look for those signal words into new parts of the argument and the last thing we want to consider here is avoiding over generalization so instead of zooming out and looking at this big broad overview and trying to make that the argument we really want to zoom in and look at all the specific parts of the argument and articulate all of those in our response for question 2 explaining the line of reasoning we want to make sure that we are not simply restating but that we're explaining and that involves going into the why and the how in terms of how the writer crafts the argument so not so much restatement but explanation what i encourage my students to do is as they read underline claims and mark them with a c um and you'll be able to do that in administration one um especially maybe administration two and three as well marking claims with c and that's just kind of a quick thing you can do as you read so author's claims are often found not always but often found at the beginning or end of paragraph so that may be the first place that you look when you're trying to identify claims also as you write your response remember that this question is asking you to explain the line of reasoning so if we're talking about a line it might be helpful to move chronologically through the article and looking for words that signal transitions question two it does involve some summary but we want to make sure that our response is focused on explanation not summary sometimes to explain we have to summarize a little bit but that's not all we want to do otherwise we won't do very well on this question so we want to make sure to explain so we're and specifically what we are explaining is the relationship among the claims because that speaks more to line of reasoning what we want to avoid with this question is simply a list of claims and remember to look for those signals those transitions maybe however some people say things like that those are cues that can indicate things like a counter argument um you know or or we're moving to a new claim or a new part of the of the argument let's take a look for a second at some phrases that might help you write question two um and that you might want to use in your response so if you look at some of these the author presents the scenario that the author contrasts this with the author supports this claim by look at those verbs that are highlighted in blue presents contrast supports follows outlines applies addresses these are verbs that will kind of naturally push you into explaining versus the verb says which will just kind of lead you towards summary so think about some of these verbs as you write your response to question two okay let's talk about question three evaluating the evidence so this question again asks you to evaluate which means judge or determine and again as as we're annotating the text a helpful tip might be to underline specific pieces of evidence and mark those with an e that way when you go back to write the response you've clearly got things marked c and e so when we're writing this response we want to choose key pieces of evidence and we want to evaluate their relevance to the argument their credibility but also their connection to the claims that last part is really important we also need to say and this is critical so everybody listen up we need to say how or why we came to this evaluation so simply saying that this is strong or this is weak or this is relevant or this is credible isn't enough to score high on this question we need to say what makes it strong weak credible or relevant so we need to explain our thought process and how we came to that determination why do we think it's strong why do we think it's credible so we've got to explain that as a part of question three to score well in order to evaluate the evidence we might have to do a little summary just like we talked about for question two but don't let this be it it's not a summary question so the response should be mostly evaluative a few other things to consider um for this question are to use an objective tone so kind of pretend that you're you're sitting back and you're objectively evaluating this so we don't want to get angry with the author we don't want to condemn or praise the author we really just want to be an impartial judge we're also evaluating specific pieces of evidence not the evid not just the evidence as a whole we can evaluate the evidence as a whole that's great we also need to evaluate specific pieces of evidence we want to include an evaluation of what may be successful or compelling evidence and what may be lacking so maybe we look for claims with no evidence or weaker evidence and those can be a part of our evaluation something else to remember here is that it's okay to be nuanced for example you can say things like this partially explains or supports the claim but this evidence could have included something else which would have strengthened it so you can kind of use that nuancy language um you know because maybe maybe some evidence is is partially effective but not fully effective so you can go into that in your evaluation just keep in mind as you're thinking about you know the objective of this question which is to evaluate some key words evaluation we're assessing we're critiquing we're determining we're judging so we can't just summarize and we cannot just explain so just remember those key verbs for this one we're evaluating let's pause for a minute i want to talk about footnotes for just a second so you may have in your article a footnote and you guys have seen articles this year with footnotes and we'll look at this in an example text in just a second consider footnotes as a part of your evaluation they may give you the origin of the information and they may have been hyperlinks in the original article so consider those as you're thinking through credibility relevance things like that and just keep in mind that we don't have to guess at things that we don't know so for example if an organization is mentioned but there's not a description we don't have to guess we can actually just talk about that that maybe we need to know a little bit more about that organization for that evidence to be effective so we don't have to guess we just need to consider what we're given and we may also be left with some doubt or questions that's okay use all of that in your evaluation it's fine to say that evidence is lacking and then finally remember what we said about ellipses that we cannot evaluate content that we don't have and remember an ellipsis is going to indicate that something has been omitted so when you see that just brush right on by it and move on in the article so we're only evaluating the content that we have okay this slide shows you some phrases that might be helpful to you as you write question three at the question three response if you look at some of these we'll just go over a couple of them the evidence is particularly effective because the argument could have been strengthened had the author included okay if you read through these we highlighted the word because and one of the reasons for that is if you you know if we only say the evidence is particularly effective period that's not really evaluating so we need the because we need the why so tell us why tell us why you think that and if you look at these different kind of stems that might help you as you're articulating your response you'll notice that every single one of them implies a continuation and that's for a reason to score high on this question we need the continuation we need to talk about because why the last one says the author provides no evidence to support this claim so that speaks for itself but some of these others imply a continuation so that's important to consider and some of these may help you as you're thinking through articulating your own response to question three okay so we're going to practice with an example text so this is the 2018 sample the neuroscience of your brain on fiction and if you can pause the video here you can access the full article using that tiny url so if you have a minute go ahead and download the full text print it if you can and read the full article as you do i want to encourage you to practice reading with those strategies that we talked about earlier such as marking claims with c marking evidence with e looking at the title telling us looking at what that's telling us about the text and also considering reading maybe the first and last paragraphs to get a sense of the text as a whole before we read the entire article one other strategy i'll mention sometimes it's helpful to also write a brief summary statement in the margins of each major section that may also help you determine the various parts of the argument okay hopefully you had a chance to read through that article you'll notice that the first part of this text is talking about reading fiction and specifically its value and we see that in paragraph one so this should tell us right away that this article is at least in part going to be focused on the benefits of fiction and we should also notice just from this excerpt that's presented here that fiction seems to stimulate different regions of the brain so if you had a chance to read the rest of the article you notice that later the author goes into more detail on how reading fiction benefits our social interactions with other people okay and let's pause for a second and just notice the footnote so you may have an article that simply says in a 2006 study published in the journal of neuroimage however you might also see a little tiny number next to the word study or something similar to that in an article that that you have on your exam and if you see those little tiny numbers that's indicating a footnote so you want to look down at the bottom of the text and look to see what that's telling us about that specific source so if we look down there we see okay this is we actually see the title of that article and we see that it is from the journal neural image and it tells us the author so it gives us some more information and that may help us in our evaluation so just look for the footnotes and consider those in your evaluation for question three okay let's talk about question two because remember it might be helpful to answer question two first as it requires you to identify the claims explain the line the author's line of reasoning we might wanna do that first before we try to tackle question one okay so here you'll see some of the key claims from the entire article and if you read the article and you found more that's okay these are just most of the major points and even if you listed the claims and sequence them differently that's fine too so this is just a summary of most of the major claims in the article that you read now let's take a look at a high scoring response for question two pause the presentation for a minute and read through this response you'll notice that the claims are highlighted in orange when we're thinking about question two we need to remember two things we want to identify the claims but we also want to discuss the connections among the claims and this is how we explain line of reasoning so this high scoring response does accurately identify most of the author's claims it does begin with kind of a misidentification it says that novels are seen with lessening value compared to technology but there are also several accurate claims so that misstatement doesn't really lessen what the student has achieved here the response identifies the author's claim with reading novels can stimulate sensory parts of our brains and then the student goes on to explain the author's line of reasoning by highlighting how the author connects the evidence and making a summary statement that these two claims work together to support an additional claim that the brain registers reading much like it does in real life the response also provides additional claims that the brain treats fictional social interactions as it were as if it were real novels give readers a chance to explore characters minds and that novels help readers improve their social skills let's talk a little bit about line of reasoning in this high scoring response so this response provides more evidence and explains how that evidence backs up the original claim and how the author makes a shift from physical to emotional experiences when providing evidence for the claims okay now let's take a look at a medium scoring response pause the video and read this medium score for question two so you'll notice that the claims that this student made or identified are highlighted in orange and this student did accurately identify many of the authors claims such as narratives activate multiple parts of the brain and works of fiction simulate reality and even interactions among fictional characters mimic real-life encounters they also identified by reading fiction one can improve their real-life social skills where this response falls short though is that there's no clear explanation of the connections between the claims and their relationship to the argument so it superficially addresses the line of reasoning through transitions the student says to support or the author suggested and this identification of some of the connections means that the response is going to score more than low but the level of explanation isn't enough to to let this response get to the high score so we've got to do more than simply this in our explanation of how the the claims relate to each other and how they relate to the overall argument okay so as a summary for question two the high scoring responses accurately identify most of the claims maybe not all but most of the claims and they provide an explanation of those connections among the claims so how are they related to each other so that helps us trace the line of reasoning so that's what we want to do throughout that response we're also going to connect those claims back to the overall argument a medium score response is going to identify some of the claims and we've got a little bit of identity identification of the connection so there's a little bit of explanation there but those connections might be superficial they're just not thorough enough and then the low scoring responses maybe only accurately identify one claim perhaps or they completely omit references to the connections between the claims so the key here is that simply listing claims with no reference to explanation of how the claims connect to each other is going to score a low okay let's talk about question three so as you can see in this chart this is just zooming in on four pieces of specific evidence from the text and you can see those in the right hand column and then in the middle column you see a little bit of the credibility and then the source on the left so these are examples of possible pieces of evidence that students might discuss in their responses pause the video and take a minute to read through this high scoring sample for question three this response earned a score of six because it not only identifies multiple pieces of evidence but it evaluates in detail how specific pieces of evidence are relevant to the claims being made or are from a credible source so for example in paragraph one this student comments on the efficacy of fmri as being more accurate than an observational or behavioral study and they also raise a concern about the method of the experiment that the author does not address the response then goes on to evaluate the strength of the evidence they say the correlation between sent words and brain activity is enough to make the study an effective representation of its findings especially when corroborated with the brain and language study this is a critical assessment of specific evidence and it considers strengths and weaknesses and it's an indicator of a high scoring response for example the word corroborated indicates a strength in the second and third paragraphs this response considers the credibility of specific sources quoted in the article stating about raymond about the raymond mars study and they say its presence in the prestigious annual review of psychology suggests it has undergone intensive review making the conclusions drawn very trustworthy and effective high-level responses like this one provide specific reasons why they consider a particular piece of evidence to be credible rather than just stating that something is credible or not credible or that it's strong or weak pause the video for just a minute and read through this medium scoring response okay as you can see what's highlighted in red lacks specific detail and could be applied to almost any article it's not wrong but it's overly general so this student says here the author utilizes a myriad of studies and researchers who lend belief to her overarching claim so what do we mean by myriad of studies and researchers and lend belief these are just kind of vague overly general statements so again they're not wrong they're just lacking some specificity here in this highlighted section the student says these studies come from renowned universities and journals such as neuroimage emory york and toronto university so the student has mentioned the journals and renowned universities but it's not thorough so it states specific names but it doesn't explain so the evaluation is implied it just needs to be explained the student needs to elaborate on this okay let's take a look at this moment in this medium scoring response here they say quoting of doctors and use of counter claims this shows that she has taken into account the other research so part of the problem here is that we don't know which claims are part of the text the student is referring to so this is kind of generic language that isn't specific to actual claims in the article and then here in the medium scoring response some of the shortcomings are found and not explaining why this matters so this there is some brief evaluation here so this is a start but what do we mean by sum what do we mean by this we might even need to elaborate a little bit on what shortcomings we're referring to so this statement makes general evaluative statements about the argument as a whole which is why it scores a medium so it's not scoring a high though because it lacks detail so to summarize for question three the high scoring responses are going to provide a detailed evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence and they're going to discuss specific pieces and remember they're not just going to list the evidence but they're going to evaluate the evidence in detail really indicating why the student believes that those pieces of evidence are strong or weak or credible or not credible a medium scoring response might identify some of the pieces of evidence but the evaluation is going to be vague it's going to be superficial it's going to be a little bit lacking like we saw in that medium scoring response and then a low scoring response we'll probably make broad statements about the evidence but may not address any specific pieces of evidence so the key here the big takeaway for question three is to address the why why are you making that specific evaluation and that'll help you be really successful on question three okay let's talk about question one if you're practicing along with us with this article the 2018 sample we're going to try answering question one last so take a minute and see if you can identify all the parts of the argument now that we've worked through the claims and the evidence you may want to pause the video for a minute okay so like we've said we may more accurately determine all parts of the argument after we've engaged with claims and evidence so this technique here involves listing the title the claims and then categorizing the claims and this may be a helpful strategy for you as you work through question one so as you can see highlighted in yellow we can see the theme that reading fiction has benefits highlighted in green we can see that reading fiction seems to stimulate the brain and then highlighted in blue because our brain doesn't make much of a distinction between what we read and what happens in real life the the key here is that reading fiction can help improve our social skills and interactions with others so we see three major categories emerge as we look at our claims list and you know even though you may not have highlighters to work with you can still kind of indicate this um and maybe category one category two category three as you're kind of working through and trying to identify the different parts of the argument so go back to the claims let that help you as you're working through different key parts let's take a look at a high versus a medium response to question one in the high you can see that the student is identifying all the parts the student says the author asserts that neuroscience is provide is proving that fictional stories stimulate the brain and benefit social capabilities so we've got all parts we've got um that fictional stories that they stimulate the brain and that they benefit social interaction so the student is saying that a little bit differently but they're still getting the idea that we're talking about social interaction here look at the medium in the article the neuroscience of your brain on fiction annie murphy paul argues that reading fictional texts can stimulate the brain and improve an individual in ways that other media cannot so this this medium score response shows a common problem in question one which is over generalization it actually starts off really strong we've got this stimulates the brain part but then it gets a little bit vague so improving an individual what we need to know here is how it's missing the social interaction piece so a key key idea to remember here is that we need to be specific when we talk about the parts of the argument so for question one high scoring responses are going to accurately identify each of the main parts of the argument with enough specificity to demonstrate an understanding of the argument as a whole so that's key here is to remember with specificity so be detailed when you're talking about those various parts of the argument a medium score might only identify part of the argument and they might over generalize the other parts so a key part of the argument is lost and then a low scoring response most likely misstates or misinterprets or over generalizes to the point where we really don't know that that student has understood the argument so a key takeaway for this question is don't zoom out too much zoom in a little bit and make sure to look for all parts of the argument also just to remind everybody don't simply rephrase the title the title will indicate uh the scope of the the article and what the focus of the article is but it's not going to give us the argument all right so what should we take away from all of this to be successful on part a first of all you've been doing this all year so don't be scared have confidence you're ready for this you've acquired skills and you guys can do this use the language that you already know to respond to the questions so we've been practicing with these words all year claims evidence relevance credibility verbs like support words such as effective strengthen weaken and drawing conclusions so use that language as you work through each question in part a for question one just remember don't over generalize the argument look for all the parts question two explain don't summarize question three we want to evaluate beyond credibility that might be the easy thing to do but that's not what's gonna help us be successful on question three we need to look at things like what evidence is missing how does evidence support the different claims that the author is making and and lastly but importantly say why you have made that assessment remember that you don't have to guess about content respond only to what the author has presented so when you see omitted sections just ignore those and look only at what you're given don't stress about time remember that you can take more than 30 minutes you can take maybe even up to 45 to complete part a because you have ample time for part b and then also wanted to remind students taking digital exams once you've clicked next after question three you can't go back so make sure you do each part before you move on i hope that was helpful and i wish all of you the best of luck on your ap seminar exam thank you