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

3 comments:

Plumbago said...

That's a great set of questions. They are deep, but I don't think that counts against them in the least. If anything, by setting up such targets biology seems much more fundamental and important than it often does (e.g. while classifying bryophytes).

My only general point would be to check what level of students these are aimed at? I think they're appropriate for all levels, but I suspect they may be a bit too deep for many younger students who just don't yet have the background knowledge to address them.

If I can get all specific on you, I like the first two questions a lot. I think the first one could even be expanded to take in biology-tangential topics like climate change, where I think students could learn a lot about how the IPCC makes its assessments.

The second question will be a great one for answers. I'll be really interested to hear what your students say to that. I've got my own ideas, of course, but I'd love to hear what those less invested in biology have to say.

I'd struggle a bit with question 8, but that may be because I'm now quite far removed from terrestrial ecology. Life at the planktonic level, though impacted during the anthropocene, is less obviously so than land ecosystems that bump up alongside us. Though that might just be a function of my ignorance of marine ecology.

Also, I sort-of found the two part structure of question 9 potentially a bit repetitive / confusing. The first part can be answered (at least in part) by looking at cellular-level structures (though I'm guessing you're looking for more imaginative responses), but the second question can also be answered with reference to this. I think I'm just not seeing what you're getting at here.

Anne said...

Plumbago, thanks for your comments, especially about which questions confused you, or you found difficult. This gives me a chance to rethink or revise.

Ideally, I'd like to develop a set of questions that *could* be used with high school students through upper undergraduate, perhaps with subtle rewording or vocabulary choices. My target group for this iteration is non-majors biology. For my non-majors, one can begin by assuming that they have had high school biology at some point, but that it is foggy or forgotten.

I'm not certain if you have something similar to a community college in the UK, but our students range in age from fresh out of high school (18yrs) to re-entry students working on a second career or finally earning a degree (any age). Many students go on from our schools to 4-yrs schools like UC or the state college system to earn BA/BS degrees.

I'll give questions 8 and 9 some more thought and get back to you. Students will be doing a project with question 2 this semester, and I'll post some of the work from that when it is completed!

Plumbago said...

Ah-ha. I was thinking that you meant the list for a broader range of students that included much younger ones. If it's 18+, I don't really see any problem there. By that point they should be awake enough for the questions to be worth engaging with, even if their biological schooling to date has been lost in the mists of time. With younger students you might just wind up with a lot of sniggering at the latter part of question 7.

Incidentally, question 8 may make perfect sense - it's just not one that I'm confident that I could make a case for vis-a-vis marine systems. Some compromised ecosystems would be easy to pick out (e.g. wrecked reefs; trawled seabed), but others might be less easy to distinguish. A case in point might be the effects of ocean acidification, which may just tip the species balance in a manner difficult to distinguish from background variability.