SENIOR CAPSTONES Honors Capstone: Social Justice and Public Policy The Social Justice Capstone seeks to enroll motivated and curious students who are interested in engaging deeply with social justice and civic action. Core elements include continuously developing social and cultural understandings, building empathy for self and others, and finding, framing, and solving problems. This course provides an opportunity for students to develop a greater understanding of real world problems that emerge from social issues facing our community partners and the greater Los Angeles area. In order to address these problems, the course is steeped in the tenets of design thinking and a human-centered approach toward investigating issues, and developing solutions for a specific community or client. Students in this course will engage with resources, texts, individuals, and organizations throughout Los Angeles as they develop a more complete picture of the people and communities represented in our city, and uncover pathways for offering support, solutions, and partnership through a social justice and civic engagement lens.
Honors Capstone: Spanish
Honors Capstone: AP Statistics
This Honors Capstone in Spanish provides advanced students with a strong interest in developing their language skills through cultural and interdisciplinary research to deepen their understanding of the nuances that shape the Spanish-speaking world. Students become active participants in Hispanic communities in our metropolitan area. Students work towards an intermediate-high level of proficiency stated by the Common European Framework of Reference of Languages (CEFR). Students explore complex written and spoken discourse while deconstructing cultural practices, products, and perspectives. Students produce clear and detailed texts in different rhetorical formats and give detailed presentations with relevant support and argumentation. The course consists of three equal, simultaneous, and interdependent components. The first is the viewing and analysis of a series of Spanish language films from Latin America and Spain with the purpose of reflecting upon themes such as identity, coming of age, justice, community and social responsibility, and raising awareness of the historical and cultural contexts of the films. Service in and reflection upon an area of need within the Spanish-speaking communities of Southern California is the second component. The final component is the publication of an online magazine in Spanish with a culminating print version toward the end of the school year.
Prerequisites: Algebra 2/Trigonometry and approval of the department. This course is similar to an introductory, non-calculus-based, college-level statistics course. Students develop strategies for collecting, organizing, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. They will then design, administer, and tabulate results from surveys and experiments. Probability and simulations aid students in constructing models for chance behavior. Sampling distributions provide the logical structure for confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Students use a TI-nspire graphing calculator, R and RStudio statistical software, and Web-based applets to investigate statistical concepts. To develop effective statistical communication skills, students are required to prepare frequent written and oral analyses of real data. This course will be taught concurrently with the AP Statistics course; however, students are not required to take the AP Exam in May. Students will complete a capstone final research project and presentation.
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