Our AP Environmental Science online course is designed for students who are curious about the natural world—and ready to study it with real scientific rigor. This course is ideal for homeschoolers seeking flexible, mastery-based learning; and who want totake the AP Environmental Science exam. In this course, you won’t just memorize vocabulary about ecosystems, pollution, and climate. You’ll learn how environmental systems actually work, how humans shape those systems (often unintentionally), and how scientists measure, model, and respond to environmental change.
As with all Cicero Learning courses, your experience is built around the relationship between you and your teacher. Together we’ll create a learning rhythm that fits your pace, your strengths, and your interests—whether you’re a student who loves data and systems thinking, a strong writer who wants to sharpen argumentation, or someone who learns best through discussion and real-world problem solving. This is a serious, high-level science course, but it should also feel alive, relevant, and deeply connected to the world you live in.
How This Online AP Environmental Science Course Works
This AP Environmental Science online course is structured around weekly independent work and live class meetings, designed to build both content mastery and AP exam readiness. Each week, you’ll complete assigned readings, interactive quizzes, and a chapter “test” from the course textbook: Environmental Science and Sustainability (Sherman & Montgomery, 2nd ed., 2022, W.W. Norton). Live classes meet weekly for 1 hour. Throughout the course, you’ll move through weekly modules that open once you demonstrate sufficient mastery of earlier material. That means you won’t be rushed forward before you’re ready—and you also won’t be held back once you’ve truly learned something.
A Mastery-Based Approach
Environmental science is full of interconnected systems: climate, biodiversity, land use, energy, food production, water quality, and more. Because each unit builds on what came before, this course is designed around mastery. Many assignments can be repeated as often as you (or your parent) would like in order to reach a target score. For students preparing for the exam, your teacher will help you develop a realistic weekly plan, maintain momentum, and build the habits that lead to strong outcomes on the AP exam and beyond.
Real-World Environmental Science: Labs, Decisions, and Data
During weekly live and recorded sessions, you’ll engage in impromptu labs and real-world decision-making activities that help you connect scientific ideas to real environmental problems. You might interpret a graph of atmospheric CO₂ trends, evaluate the tradeoffs of a land-use plan, or analyze the downstream effects of agricultural runoff on aquatic ecosystems. Each unit may also include an online or documented lab experience, giving you a chance to practice the kind of applied thinking that makes environmental science meaningful. Even when you’re working with simulations or case studies rather than a traditional classroom lab bench, the goal stays the same: you learn to observe carefully, reason scientifically, and support conclusions with evidence.
Learning to Think Like the AP Exam
The AP Environmental Science exam rewards students who can read closely, interpret data, apply concepts, and write clearly under time pressure. To prepare you well, we’ll practice the exam format intentionally—without reducing the course to test prep alone.
Throughout the semester, you’ll complete timed free-response questions (FRQs) followed by interactive, self-grading reviews. Your teacher will guide you through what the College Board is actually looking for, including how points are earned (or lost), and what makes an answer scientifically accurate, specific, and complete. These FRQs are not formally scored, but they are designed to teach you how the exam evaluates responses so you can improve quickly and confidently.
You’ll also complete College Board quizzes and unit tests, which mirror the format and rigor of the AP exam. Because College Board content cannot be repeated, your teacher will help you approach these assessments strategically and thoughtfully.
In the final 3–4 weeks prior to the AP Exam, the course shifts into full review mode. Together we’ll focus on practice exams, targeted remediation, FRQ strategy, and high-yield content connections that often determine a student’s final score.
Core Units in AP Environmental Science
This course covers all primary units tested by the AP® College Board. While the pacing and emphasis might shift based on your strengths and progress, your course will include the full scope of AP Environmental Science content, including:
- Unit 1: The Living World—Ecosystems
- Unit 2: The Living World—Biodiversity
- Unit 3: Populations
- Unit 4: Earth Systems and Resources
- Unit 5: Land and Water Use
- Unit 6: Energy Resources and Consumption
- Unit 7: Atmospheric Pollution
- Unit 8: Aquatic and Terrestrial Pollution
- Unit 9: Global Change
- Unit 10: Practice Exams
Within these units, you’ll explore the science behind major environmental challenges—while also learning how those challenges connect to economics, public policy, ethics, and human behavior. Environmental science is, by nature, interdisciplinary. You’ll be asked to think across systems, not just within them.
Skills You’ll Build
AP Environmental Science isn’t only about what you know—it’s about what you can do with what you know. Over the course of the semester, you’ll strengthen a set of scientific skills that will serve you in future science courses, college-level writing, and real-world problem solving.
In this course, you’ll learn how to:
- Explain environmental concepts and processes clearly and accurately
- Analyze data, visual representations, and scientific writing
- Apply quantitative methods to solve environmental problems
- Propose solutions to environmental challenges and support them with evidence
- Analyze a research study, including identifying a hypothesis and interpreting results
You’ll also build confidence in communicating scientific ideas—whether that means writing a strong FRQ response, discussing a case study in class, or making sense of a complex graph under time pressure.
The Big Questions You’ll Explore
Environmental science is ultimately the study of relationships: between organisms and ecosystems, between humans and natural resources, and between the choices we make today and the world we create tomorrow.
Throughout this course, you’ll return to questions like:
How can we meet the needs of a growing population while sustaining natural resources? What does science tell us about our dependence on the earth—and our responsibility to it? How can communities collaborate to address environmental challenges at local and global scales?
Together we’ll approach these questions with intellectual honesty and scientific discipline. You’ll learn to evaluate evidence, recognize tradeoffs, and think beyond simplistic answers. In a world full of environmental headlines, this course helps you understand what’s actually happening—and how scientists know.
Who This Course Is For
This AP environmental science course is a strong fit if you’re a student who wants a challenging, college-level science experience and thrives with structured support. This AP Environmental Science for homeschoolers is specifically designed for worldschoolers and students in nontraditional learning environments who want a course that is both academically serious and deeply connected to the real world.
Whether you’re motivated by ecology, climate science, conservation, engineering, public health, or simply a desire to understand the planet more clearly, this course can meet you where you are—and push you toward where you want to go.
By the end of our work together, you won’t just be “ready for the AP exam.” You’ll be more prepared to think critically about the world, interpret environmental claims with confidence, and contribute thoughtfully to the conversations that matter most.
