The Vail Unified School District No. 20 will adopt basic student textbook and materials for the Advanced Placement of Precalculus. The District is estimating one-hundred and fifty (150) student textbooks and three (3) teacher editions will be required for the subject. Exact quantities will be determined after award, but before the issuance of a purchase order. The Director of College and Career Readiness will coordinate the District Adoption Selection Committee, to be approved by the Superintendent. Proposal submissions shall include: • Book title, author, copyright dates, ISBN number and net price • Supplemental materials which are basic to the use of the text • Information on all available resource/ancillary materials • Information regarding which teacher editions and resource packages will be furnished • Include a current product catalog with submission(s) Publishers shall provide any required training on how to effectively use the textbook and ancillary materials free of charge during the first year of implementation. Subject area questions should be directed in writing to Purchasing Supervisor, Tori Gamble, gamblet@vailschooldistrict.org. All questions will be answered in the form of a posted addendum. COURSE DESCRIPTION AP Precalculus centers on functions modeling dynamic phenomena. This research-based exploration of functions is designed to better prepare students for college-level calculus and provide grounding for other mathematics and science courses. In this course, students study a broad spectrum of function types that are foundational for careers in mathematics, physics, biology, health science, business, social science, and data science. Furthermore, as AP Precalculus may be the last mathematics course of a student’s secondary education, the course is structured to provide a coherent capstone experience rather than exclusively focusing on preparation for future courses. Throughout this course, students develop and hone symbolic manipulation skills, including solving equations and manipulating expressions, for the many function types throughout the course. Students also learn that functions and their compositions, inverses, and transformations are understood through graphical, numerical, analytical, and verbal representations, which reveal different attributes of the functions and are useful for solving problems in mathematical and applied contexts. In turn, the skills learned in this course are widely applicable to situations that involve quantitative reasoning. AP Precalculus fosters the development of a deep conceptual understanding of functions. Students learn that a function is a mathematical relation that maps a set of input values— the domain—to a set of output values—the range—such that each input value is uniquely mapped to an output value. Students understand functions and their graphs as embodying dynamic covariation of quantities, a key idea in preparing for calculus. With each function type, students develop and validate function models based on the characteristics of a bivariate data set, characteristics of covarying quantities and their relative rates of change, or a set of characteristics such as zeros, asymptotes, and extrema. These models are used to interpolate, extrapolate, and interpret information with different degrees of accuracy for a given context or data set. Additionally, students also learn that every model is subject to assumptions and limitations related to the context. As a result of examining functions from many perspectives, students develop a conceptual understanding not only of specific function types but also of functions in general. This type of understanding helps students to engage with both familiar and novel contexts...
