Though many high school students spend their summers blissfully disconnected from school work, indulging in vacation, hot weather and summer activities, more than 50 Tuscaloosa City and Tuscaloosa County students are spending their free time prepping for Advanced Placement classes.

CollegeFirst, run by the University of Alabama’s Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility and A+ College, works to respond to Alabama’s declining math and science skills on the national and global stage by preparing high school students to succeed in college-level math, science and English Advanced Placement classes.

Twenty-two University of Alabama students, like senior Lindsay Scholes Blowers, work with CollegeFirst as mentors to high school students.

“My main responsibility as a mentor is to help students learn — to help them become familiar with AP tasks and explanations and to make them feel confident in their reading and writing abilities,” Scholes Blowers, a secondary education major, said. “Each day is divided into a lecture portion, guided by the master teacher, and a mentor portion. We helped students practice what they learned from the master teacher, and we tried to boost their confidence in their thinking and writing skills.”

Addie Mancuso, content coordinator for the AP biology course in Birmingham, said the program recruits bright students who have chosen to take AP courses in the fall in schools that might have new or weak AP programs. The high school students spend three weeks preparing for their upcoming classes in sessions led by AP teachers and supplemented by college mentors.

Mancuso said the classes are presented in lecture format, so students can cultivate note-taking skills while absorbing the subject material. CollegeFirst is designed to develop the skills and abilities necessary for success in AP classes, she said, but also teaches broader skills.

“CF goes beyond just note-taking and study habits,” she said. “A large part of the program this year is learning to think critically — why something is true, how it happens — and figuring out how to apply the concepts they’ve learned.”

Mancuso said examples of this larger-scale instruction can be seen in the AP biology program, where students attend lecture and labs for the first two weeks but then design their own experiment to end the program.

“The students design, carry out and present their experiment to their peers, cultivating critical reasoning skills and deep understanding along the way,” Mancuso said.

Scholes Blowers said she got excited about the program after learning that passing an AP test in science or math makes a student globally competitive academically.

“This is exciting, and we hope CollegeFirst will give students a jump start toward this accomplishment,” she said. “More importantly, we hope to build students’ intrinsic motivation. Verbal skills are useful, if not crucial, in all disciplines and all careers.”

Stephen Black, director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility, said in a CollegeFirst press release that the program helps high schools students excel in college, not just attend college.

“All high school students deserve an opportunity to succeed in rigorous, college-level experiences,” Black said. For Scholes Blowers, the program means more than just the AP test.

“We want our students to do more than pass a test,” she said. “We want them to blow the test out of the water and then apply the skills they have gained to bigger and better and more meaningful things — because they are entirely capable of doing so.”