Monday, August 17, 2009

Essential Questions for Biology

Always up to improving my curriculum, this semester I will be continuing my work to apply aspects of the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum model to my courses. This model, developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe based on their work at the college level, and published by ASCD in 2005 ("http://www.shop.ascd.org/productdisplay.cfm?productid=103055"), involves two main elements: 1) focusing learning around essential questions and 2) designing assessments to evaluate student understanding of these questions before designing individual lessons of instruction.

Today I would like to share the 10 essential questions I plan to use this semester in my Non-Majors Biology course. Yes, these questions may seem very deep. Essential questions are intended to be something which requires the student to reach into their ability to apply, analyze or evaluate information or situations. The questions are to be the sort of stuff that you could make a life of answering, spiraling back on them again and again as you grow in your understanding of a particular content. Ideally, assessments would let students demonstrate their understanding of these questions, perhaps through essay form, but more ideally by taking the information they have learned reaching for these questions to create something.

1. How do scientists investigate a problem and report their results?
2. What should every person know about biology?
3. What is life? Why are there ambiguities about what “life” is? What factors might you examine to classify life into groups?
4. How will a basic knowledge of chemistry help you understand and explain biological processes?
5. How do processes that happen at a cellular level influence the structure, functions and behaviors at level of tissues, organs, organ systems or entire organisms?
6. How do DNA and RNA control the structure and function of cells and of entire organisms?
7. How are cell division and reproduction related? Why is there sexual reproduction?
8. How do we know if an ecosystem is “stable” or “healthy”?
9. How, and why, do different structures found in very different organisms (such as plant vs. animals) perform similar functions? What types of evolutionary adaptations, found in different divisions of life, have increased efficiency and survival or organisms?
10. Why did Theodosius Dobzhansky say that “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution”?


I am curious for your input, readers. What questions do you think are essential, either in biology, or in your own discipline