Educational equity through evidence
Designs and runs cross-cultural quasi-experiments that test whether emerging technology actually improves cognitive outcomes — not whether it feels like it should.
AP Capstone — Seminar · The VR School · 2025–26
Ian Jiang
Bilingual sophomore. Field researcher. Asks better questions than most adults — and proved it with statistics.
Bay Area, California · Field research at 3,000 m on the Tibetan Plateau
Ian Jiang is a tenth-grader at The VR School and an AP Seminar scholar.
His research lives where most high-school inquiry never goes: a Tibetan-Plateau elementary school at 3,000 meters above sea level.
There he ran a 106-student quasi-experiment on whether AI can lift higher-order thinking — and produced statistically significant gains a peer-reviewed graduate student would be proud of.
The numbers that anchor the argument
See methodology →106
Students in study
Tibetan elementary, grades 3–5
+87.4%
Increase in questions per student
Treatment vs. control
36.4% → 57.4%
Shift to higher-order questions
Bloom's levels 4–6 · χ² p = 0.0001
+21.4%
Innovation score gain
Four AI-evaluated dimensions · p = 0.004
“The students I worked with on the Tibetan Plateau are not statistics. They are children who live at 3,000 meters above sea level, who walk mountain paths to school, and who deserve the same opportunities to develop their minds as any child in Beijing or San Francisco.”
“The technology works; the question our team must now address is how to ensure it keeps working after the researchers leave.”
AP Seminar — Performance Tasks
Components, in the order the College Board scores them
IRR
Individual Research Report
1,200 words · College Board scored · 10% of AP Seminar score
A scholarly review of AI-as-cognitive-scaffolding, anchored by Ian's 106-student field study on the Tibetan Plateau.
Open
IWA
Individual Written Argument
2,000 words · College Board scored · 24.5% of AP Seminar score
A response to the College Board stimulus on connection and infrastructure sustainability — synthesized through original quasi-experimental data.
Open
TMP · IMP · Defense
Presentations & Oral Defense
Teacher scored · 23.5% of AP Seminar score combined
Recordings will be embedded here once captured. Pages are ready for the 8–10 min team presentation, the 6–8 min individual presentation, and the two oral-defense questions.
Open
What Ian studies
A scholar is a person you can describe in three words and four obsessions. Here are the four.
AI as cognitive scaffolding
Investigates how AI tutors function as Vygotsky's "more knowledgeable other," especially in classrooms where one teacher serves fifty learners.
Statistical literacy in the humanities
Brings chi-square analysis, p-values, and effect-size reasoning into AP Seminar argumentation — without sacrificing prose.
Bilingual fieldwork
Conducts research in Mandarin with Tibetan students, then writes for an English-medium College Board audience. The translation is itself an inquiry skill.