Reflections On My First Biology Modeling Course

It's hard to believe I'm through with biology for the year!  The main indicator of how successful this course has been will be my students' EOC scores, both their individual scores and their growth scores based on their last science exam (middle school).

My general impression of the AMTA biology curriculum is positive overall.  Breaking it down further:

The Good

• Class periods seemed to fly by for both me and the students.  The majority of days, my students were working right up to the bell.
• Engagement was higher overall:  I had no students completely disengage and check out for any period of time, as I have in years past.  Everyone participated on some level every day, even if their greatest contribution for the day was writing on the white board in pretty colors.  It was rare for me to have to pry heads off desks or deal with students refusing to work.  Attitudes were generally better than average.
• I truly liked the sequence and how the curriculum told a story.  The units built upon each other in a logical manner, so we rarely left a topic completely behind to begin a new one.  I found the sequence far superior to how our biology textbooks and state standards are organized, which basically divides biology into three or four major chunks that don't feel connected at all.
• I also loved the lab first/inquiry format.  It made our labs a lot more meaningful.
• While still heavy on the worksheets, the exercises really forced students to think.  They couldn't just jump around and answer the easy questions, nor did they have those random "critical thinking" questions that you see on traditional textbook worksheets-- I despise those things.
• My socratic questioning skills have greatly improved-- that shows in my administrator evaluations.  I was scoring 4s and 5s out of 5 in questioning, where in previous years I was scoring 3s at best.
• I do feel like many of my students have improved their scientific reasoning skills and have a better grasp on biology as a whole than in years past.
• My students also seemed more comfortable about speaking up in class (although this was occasionally to my own detriment, ha!).
• I also feel like I covered my state standards better than I ever have in the past.  Although I don't know if that's a function of the modeling curriculum, or just general experience with teaching biology for several years now.  Ecology, testing for macromolecules, and dihybrid crosses were the only things that I needed to add to the existing AMTA lesson plans.  I did more justice to some standards that I have frequently glossed over (cough cough evolution).  

The Bad

• I had an achievement gap all year that I could not close for the life of me.  The majority of my students excelled, but some could not grasp anything we were doing (evident in the MBCI results for my standard biology class). Those students continued to fall further and further behind.  What is even more frustrating for me is that several of the students on the wrong side of the achievement gap were trying very hard-- most of them weren't your unmotivated slackers who have given up on school.  They were doing assignments, they were participating-- they just weren't improving AT ALL.  I have never experienced this problem to this degree.  I usually pride myself on being able to teach something to everyone.
• Along the same lines, I had more course failures this semester than I have ever had for biology.  Out of 58 students, I had 3 failures.  While that number isn't excessive per se, it is higher than usual for my classes.  Also, all of those failing students were female, which really has me scratching my head and wondering if there was a connection.
• I'm worried about my EOC scores.  Even my honors students thought the test was really hard.  My students in years past also have always thought the test was hard, yet did fine when their scores came back.  I guess I won't know until I see their quick scores in January.
• There was NOT enough rigor for honors.  Part of this is my lack of experience with honors:  I'm still trying to figure out how best to differentiate my standard and honors curriculum.  About half my honors students have 100% averages this semester, which is a little bit embarrassing.
• My classroom is usually a bit chaotic and informal-- that's just my personality.  The atmosphere of my classroom was even more chaotic and informal this year.  Usually, I don't mind so long as the students are on-task and learning.  But the chaos became a bit of a problem towards the end of the semester, when my students suddenly seemed to regress into elementary school behavior with the holiday break approaching.  To be quite frank, they have downright ticked me off over the past couple weeks with their immaturity.  I want them to enjoy learning and be comfortable enough to take risks in the classroom, but I also want them to know how to conduct themselves in college or a workplace.

Improvements to be made

• Pacing!  Now that I've done it once, I know that I really need to pick and choose activities at the beginning of the year.  I would rather have the time to do some of the more in depth reinforcement/model deployment activities in units 5-7 than waste so much time on units 1-3.
• Along with the pacing, I am still struggling to find a good balance for board meeting discussions.  They often got cut short by the bell, or drug on FOREVER in the case of my large class.  Board meetings became boring meetings many times, with students only talking when they were directly questioned.  In my ideal classroom, the board meetings would hopefully become more student-driven.
• I didn't assign textbooks this semester and I feel like I should have.  I go back and forth every year about assigning textbooks.  I don't have a classroom, so I can't just keep a classroom set handy.  This year, I had a cart with books that I brought to class when I planned on using them.  I don't rely on the textbook heavily, but I do think it would have been helpful for my lower achieving students to have it as a resource (or at least address the excuse, "I couldn't do the homework because you didn't give us a book!).  The problem with assigning textbooks is that the students conveniently never bring them to class when they need them.
• I feel like I needed more assessment-- exit tickets, more repetitive questioning, individual grill & drill practice, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I thought the included exercises were very strong, and all of the questioning and discussion gave me tons of opportunities for formative assessment.  I also included weekly quizzes and daily bell ringers.  But with so much group work and collaboration, my weaker students kept managing to trick me into thinking that they were improving when test results said again and again that they truly weren't.  After every test, I was at least partially surprised by the number of failures.
• I loved the interactive lab notebooks, but they needed more structure. I'm thinking maybe a vocab or concept check list given at the beginning of each unit to match up to what they're writing in their notebook??
• I need to figure out a way to best incorporate the concept of "the model" for biology.  I fell back into the PowerPoint trap a lot in the middle of the year.  This may be slightly easier for most topics in chemistry.

It is going to be really interesting with chemistry next semester:  I had very respectful and mature students this semester.  They were "game" to work and generally well behaved.  Next semester, I unfortunately already know of a lot of the students in my classes... let's just say I don't exactly have the cream of the crop.  On my roster there are a lot of students with regular disciplinary problems, a lot of truancy, and a lot of students with history of failure.  It's going to be a different classroom culture than this semester.  At the same time, I have several students that I also taught for biology last year with the traditional lecture/lab pedagogy.  Some were good students, some were dreadful students. I'm curious to see how they will react to the modeling curriculum and if it is reflected in their EOC and ACT scores.

Modeling Biology Concept Inventory Post-Test Results

I could use any/all of the following things in excess to cope with my students' Modeling Biology Concept Inventory post-test results:

The results were that disappointing.  To recap, I have one section of standard biology and two sections of honors biology.  This is the first year I've ever had honors classes-- in prior years, I've only taught standard sections of biology.  I used the same modeling biology curriculum with both standard and honors.  My classes were surprisingly small this semester, with the exception of one honors section of 34 students.  I have not had a chance to break down the data by concept or standard yet; I've only entered the raw scores.

Here's the run down:

Section 1:  Standard Biology (12 students)

Pre-Test Class Average:  8/30 (27%)

Post-Test Class Average:  13/30 (43%)

Class Growth Average:  4 points

One student, who is currently failing, actually scored two points lower on the post-test as compared to the pre-test.  Two students showed no growth, scoring exactly the same (yet getting different questions correct).  The highest post-test score in this section was a 19/30, the lowest was a 7/30 from a student who showed no change. Two students showed double digit growth.  If you toss out the three students without growth, the class growth average becomes six points.  The median score pre-test score was 8/30, the median post-test score was 12/30. 

Section 2:  Honors Biology (34 students)

Pre-Test Class Average:  12/30 (40%)

Post-Test Class Average:  18/30 (60%)

Class Growth Average:  6 points

All students had a minimum of two points of growth, with six students showing double digit growth.  The low post-test score in this section was 11/30, three students scored 23/30, which was the highest score.  The median pre-test and post-test were 12/30 and 18/20, respectively.

Section 3:  Honors Biology (12 students)

Pre-Test Class Average:  10/30 (33%)

Post-Test Class Average:  17/30 (57%)

Class Growth Average:  7 points

All students in this section had a minimum of four points growth, but only one student had double digit growth.  The post-test low score was a 10/30, the high score was a 23/30.  The median pre- and post-test were 11.5/30 and 17.5/30, respectively.

I'm disappointed.  I think the MBCI is a difficult test, but these scores were still lower than I anticipated.  The fact that one of my students regressed and two of my students showed no growth is extraordinarily upsetting.  I'm also discouraged by just how low the growth and overall class averages are for each class.  A 13/30 class average is the equivalent of 43%-- that's not even passing.  I sure hope my students' EOC scores come back higher than this, or else I'm going to have some unhappy administrators.

I'm trying to think just what I could have done differently, especially to reach those three students who did not achieve in my class.  But I'm going to save my overall reflections on my first semester using the biology modeling curriculum for another post.

Dissection Fun...

The day they've all been waiting for... dissections!  If you remember, comparative dissections are technically part of Unit 4 in the modeling curriculum.  However, we needed to get through all of the state standards before the EOC.

We just did a comparison of the anatomy of the earthworm and rat.

Not the greatest earthworm picture ever

Inside the rat...

No woozy students, and only two students were "morally opposed" and opted to do the online dissections.  All in all, I'd consider it a success!

My students have only two more days of class this semester.  Tomorrow we'll do that DNA extraction that we never got around to, and then we'll review for their final test they'll take on Wednesday.  Their final test will be a combination lab practical/retaking the Modeling Biology Concept Inventory.  The MBCI data is just for me-- I'm not actually reviewing them for it, nor am I giving them a grade on it.

EOC Prep: Data, data everywhere...

What have I been doing?  Data tracking.  Tomorrow is my students' state end of course exam for biology.  It's hard to believe that it's already that time...

Since last Friday, we have been working on practice tests and review.  I have been struggling over the years to find an EOC review method that works best.  Let's just say that the struggle continues.

Some teachers say they start at the beginning of the curriculum and revisit every topic, then take a practice test.  I've found that style ineffective for me and my style of teaching:  the students tune out and none of us get a very good assessment of what we know/don't know until we're done.

Lately, I have been trying to tailor review activities to individual students' needs:  I usually give a practice test as a diagnostic and use that to guide the review material.  Sometimes I have done "whole class" reviews, other years I have done individual review packets.  In a perfect world, I would give a post-practice test afterwards, but we always seem to run out of time.

This year, I sort of blended my methods.  I somehow actually had time to create a real, live data tracker for their EOC practice test results.  Data tracking is something that was stressed heavily in my alternative teacher certification program, but I've never had the time to utilize it in my own classes.  The schools I've taught at haven't mandated it, and it's time consuming to create all of the necessary tools from scratch.  But somehow this year I had a chance to sit down and make a simple excel spreadsheet to track my students performance on the EOC practice test.

Raw data for each student per question, color-coded by unit-- 1 for answering a question correctly, 0 for incorrect.

Raw scores for each student and color-coded performance for each unit.  Missing data from a handful of students, hence the reds.

I also calculated the % of students who answered each question correctly.  I had several students absent, so no question has 100% correct.

The results have been really interesting.  I also have successfully gotten myself worked up into a tizzy.  You can see the numbers for some of my standard biology students in the 2nd picture above, and they are NOT pretty.  But in years past, I do recall students doing significantly better on the actual EOC vs. the practice test.  Last year, I believe only my absolute brightest standard students even passed the same practice test, yet they all had strong scores on the real exam.  Thanks to this data tracker, I should eventually have facts to support my recollection...

Based off the data, students then had to complete a combined class/independent review activity.

There were six questions that had lower than 50% of students answering correctly.  We reviewed these six topics as a class (boring lecture style).  Of these six questions:  

• One was a cell diagram where it was unclear if the arrow was pointing to the ER specifically or a ribosome on the ER.  That was an easy fix.
• One involved a coral reef food web.  I was really surprised that this question was missed so frequently, but when I asked the class about it, apparently it was the way that the diagram was drawn that threw a lot of students off.  They misinterpreted the diagram and thought it was a trick question.
• One (well, technically two but we combined them) were testing for macromolecules in food.  We just needed to review that topic, since most students had forgotten which indicator to use for each macromolecule.
• One (technically two) were on enzymes.  I did not cover enzymes well.  We did enzymes the week my classes were disrupted by students taking the ACT Plan test.  So we revisited the topic.
• One was on the percentage of chromosomes in gametes formed by meiosis.  Now, every single student in my classes can repeat that gametes are haploid and have half the chromosomes of the parent cell.  But for some reason, seeing the number as a percentage threw them for a loop.
• The last was a tricky pedigree chart for an x-linked recessive disorder.  It began with an affected father and carrier mother who produced affected sons and daughters.  Seeing both males and females affected made many students assume it was an autosomal disorder.

After our whole class review, I gave students the breakdown of how they scored for each unit.  Based on their score, they had to attend stations with review materials for their weakest units.  The idea for the activity was good, but it was difficult to execute.  If I can find a way to streamline and organize the stations, it may work better in the future.

So... that's that.  Tomorrow is the big test.  I should find out their quick scores after the new year and their full results sometime in July.  I am extraordinarily curious to see how my standard biology class will fare and if the class average will be higher than last year's average (I didn't have any honors students last year to compare).  I really want feedback on how effective the modeling curriculum has been for my teaching!!!!

Unit 7 Reflections: Worksheets Galore

Holy worksheets!  Unit 7 could be re-titled "the unit of a thousand exercises."  Or at least that's what it feels like.  Most of the units in the curriculum until this point have had less than five exercises. Unit 7 has nine!

Granted, they are pretty good worksheets, as far as worksheets go.  I really liked Exercise 3, which basically has students work through some of Mendel's pea plant data on their own and support Mendel's conclusions.  Challenging, but not too challenging.  Unit 7 doesn't bring up Mendel's name until well after we've discussed punnett squares.  I'm becoming a big fan of this pedagogical style-- students using what they've learned to support the findings of past influential scientists.  In my mind, it's far superior to the alternative of me rambling on about Mendel's laws, then trying to have the students apply them to real life.  The engagement level seems much higher-- students were much more willing to muddle through pea plant data when they already understood what should be going on.

The worksheets are broken up by some readings in The Cartoon Guide To Genetics by Larry Gonick and Mark Wheelis.

A few weeks ago, I ordered myself a copy of this from Barnes & Noble for $11.70... Barnes & Noble had the lowest total price when you included shipping.  Well, you get what you pay for.  My lovely book FINALLY arrived today ("arrives in 2-6 business days" yeah right).  While it looks like a nice enough book, I'm past the point of utilizing it this semester.  I'm looking forward to breaking it out next year.

Exercise 4 isn't actually a worksheet, but rather a genetic disorder research activity.  It also was a nice change of pace from the worksheets upon worksheets.  Groups are assigned one of six autosomal disorders:  Cystic Fibrosis, PKU, Tay Sachs, Huntington's, Polydactyly, and Sickle Cell Anemia.  The students in the group are to research the disorder and create a circle chart of the symptoms, genetic cause, treatment, and prognosis.

Exercise 4 Circle Chart

The students then presented this information to the class.  This was a nice, low key presentation that got everybody in the room talking and presenting, since I assigned each group member a "wedge" to research and present.  In my state standards "Checks for Understanding" section, it states that students should "Design an informational brochure to describe a human genetic disorder."  While not a brochure, I think this sufficed quite nicely, especially with limited time.

We then applied what we learned about genetic disorders to a way to track these disorders in a family (enter the pedigree chart).  We also introduced the concept of sex-linked.  I sent them home with the Hemophilia:  A Royal Disease reading and a couple questions.

Tomorrow is our last day of instruction for the SEMESTER.  Seriously.  Our state EOC exam will be administered next week.  Friday will be a review day, as well as whatever days next week that my students aren't missing for other subjects' EOC exams.

So tomorrow's plan is to apply a little more practice identifying autosomal vs. sex-linked in pedigree charts, briefly discuss dihybrid/polygenic crosses, and to bust through as many of exercises 5-9 as we can.  My early prediction is that we won't get through many...

Instead of the unit test, my students will just be taking a quiz on the unit due to lack of time.  This is the first time I have had to heavily modify one of the AMTA unit tests because I thought it was too rigorous for my students.  The test has a lot of differentiation between co-dominant and incomplete dominant.  While we covered those topics in the Potato Head Genetics activity, we just didn't have time to go into as much depth as I would have liked.  Instead, I substituted sample EOC questions on genetics, which lean more towards straight Mendelian crosses and pedigree charts.