The Free AP Stats Textbook
By Leah Dorazio (guest contributor)
The story of how Advanced High School Statistics (AHSS) came to be really began in 2009, when three statistics graduate students, David Diez, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Chris Barr, galled by the high price of traditional textbooks, came together to write an open-source college statistics textbook. It was called OpenIntro Statistics. Through word of mouth (and no advertising) the book made its way from professor to professor, college to college. Now, the book is used at hundreds of colleges, including Harvard, Duke, Texas A&M, and Reed to name a few.
In 2014, a colleague introduced me to OpenIntro Statistics. I couldn’t believe it! A freely available textbook that was also chosen by multiple Ivy League schools? Intrigued, I started to wonder - could we make a modified version suitable for AP Statistics? Not only could we save school districts and families millions of dollars, but we would provide students with forever free access to their textbooks on any device. Also, by making paperback copies available wholesale for $12/book, schools could provide students with their own copies of the latest edition for a fraction of the price of stocking classroom sets of traditional textbooks.
Thus began my collaboration with David and Mine to create a textbook tailored for the AP Statistics course. The 1st edition of AHSS modified OpenIntro Statistics to include all AP content and instructions for the TI and Casio calculators. It worked for seasoned instructors but lacked guidance for newer teachers. The 2nd edition saw a complete visual redesign, making it much more pleasing and engaging to read. It was also supplemented with expanded exercise sets, Learning Objectives, Section Summaries, and Chapter Highlights. Finally, the recently released 3rd edition has been reorganized to more closely align with the AP CED. It also includes quick-start links for using the Desmos Calculator.
Like the other editions, this new edition of AHSS also has a full online suite of accompanying resources, including lecture slides, videos, data sets, and labs - all free, even for classes not using the textbook. AHSS also has a web-version, created by professors from Portland Community College after the college adopted AHSS for all of their MATH-243 and MATH-244 Introductory Statistics courses (the web-version of the 3rd edition is in progress).
The landscape of freely accessible resources has grown tremendously. OpenIntro is now a nonprofit that publishes 5 open-source statistics textbooks and has a Partner Program to support other open-source math texts as well. The College Board provides extensive video collections and online problem sets. Skew The Script and Stats Medic offer genuinely relevant and experiential lesson plans. With Desmos, we can create Activities to engage students and facilitate teacher feedback. And now, joining this wonderful collection of freely available resources is a complete AP Statistics textbook. I encourage everyone to take advantage of all these resources. You can contribute as well! OpenIntro is always interested in collaboration and feedback and is looking to expand its pool of teacher resources. If you have any interest in being part of this open-source project, please reach out - I would love to chat with you!
leah@openintro.org
You can download a free pdf of AHSS at openintro.org/ahss and you can register and request a free paperback desk copy here.