Redesigning Intro Bio Part 1: Start at the End
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash
I’ve taught Bio111 five times. Why redesign it now?
Because I recently read these:
D. Asai, B. Alberts, J. Coffey, Redo college intro science. Science 375, 1321–1321 (2022).
Osborne, J., Pimentel, D., Alberts, B., Allchin, D., Barzilai, S., Bergstrom, C., Coffey, J., Donovan, B., Kivinen, K., Kozyreva. A., & Wineburg, S. (2022). Science Education in an Age of Misinformation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
C. I. Petersen, et al., The Tyranny of Content: “Content Coverage” as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It. LSE 19, ar17 (2020).
What I took away from these readings is that we need to unstuff the curriculum to create room for students to actually learn. Yes, we all know that active learning significantly improves student understanding and retention of content — not to mention that it demonstrably reduces the achievement gap for underrepresented minority students — but it’s nearly impossible to fully adopt active learning principles if we think we must “cover all the content.” If we try to cover all the content, there just isn’t enough time in the classroom for students to think, process, and work through problems.
Ohhh, and information exchange (in humans) is substantially different than it was 20 years ago (thanks, internet), so a science education that actually prepares our students to be future scientists and citizens is one that teaches them how to navigate science-related content online.
What content to cut?
Unstuffing the curriculum means cutting content, but I’d rather not think about what to cut. Instead, I’ll follow Backward Design principles and start at the end:
What do I want my students to know and be able to do at the end of the semester?
To answer this question, I need to decide what core concepts and competencies to focus on. (This is straight out of the Tyranny of Content playbook, btw.) Luckily, some really smart people have already figured this out! Vision & Change lays out the 5 core concepts and 6 core competencies that all Biology majors should develop. But, Vision & Change focuses on the entire majors curriculum — what can my students reasonably learn in one semester?
To decide which of Vision & Change’s core concepts to focus on in my Intro Bio course, I looked at the course description. While I thankfully have substantial pedagogical freedom at my institution, my Intro Bio course must cover certain topics to be consistent with the statewide community college articulation agreements. Notably, all BIO111 courses must teach
“basic biological chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, metabolism and energy transformation, genetics, evolution, and other related topics. Upon completion, students should be able to demonstrate understanding of life at the molecular and cellular levels.”
If you’re a biology educator, you probably read this list as “teach them everything in biology except ecology,” which is basically how it feels.
Here are Vision & Change’s 5 core concepts, annotated according to what I think is most important for BIO111:
EVOLUTION!!!
Structure & Function
INFORMATION FLOW, EXCHANGE, & STORAGE!!!
Pathways and Transformations of Energy & Matter!!
Systems
I think my course should focus primarily on Evolution and Information, with a little emphasis on Energy since “metabolism” is explicitly in the course description. (I can see how someone else could interpret the course description differently and focus instead on, say, Structure & Function and Information, with Evolution and Energy as minor topics. I don’t think that would be wrong. But for me, evolution is such a critical concept in Biology, I want to put it front and center. After all, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
To turn these core competencies into a course roadmap, I wrote some rough “learning objectives:”
By the end of the course, students will be able to…
Seamlessly move through the Central Dogma from DNA replication, transcription, translation, and protein structure/function.
Describe how genetic information is passed on to offspring, and predict how genetic variation manifests in offspring populations.
Describe what causes populations to change over time.
Move between respiration and photosynthesis to articulate the carbon cycle at the biosphere level through the molecular level.
Describe the biological, social, and evolutionary relationships between human race and health.
Analyze data to make a scientific claim, and evaluate whether a scientific claim is supported by the data.
Describe the characteristics of a scientist, and personally relate to one or more scientists.
Evaluate the credibility of a Biology-related claim on the internet and articulate how the claim fits within a framework of how science is conducted.
OK, so only LO’s 1-4 & 6 are related to the core concepts and competencies of V&C — the rest are competencies that I think are critical for the introductory classroom:
LO5. Anti-racist work means bringing social issues related to race into the classroom; since learning about genetic differences between races can reinforce racial stereotypes, it’s important to me to explicitly address whether racial disparities in health outcomes are due to race-dependent genetics (spoiler: they’re not).
LO7. Anti-racist work also means busting student stereotypes about who can become a scientist; for several semesters I have assigned “Scientist Spotlight” homework, where students learn about scientists who are Black, Latino, gay, or immigrant, or who have unique hobbies or backgrounds. (I assign homework from Scientist Spotlights, iamascientist, and scientist interviews from my own Youtube channel.) These types of assignments have been shown to increase students’ ability to personally relate to scientists, and in previous semesters my students talked about the assignments as being both fun, and impactful. 10/10 recommend this type of assignment if you don’t already do it.
LO8. Finally, LO8 is consistent with the calls to action in both Redo college intro science and Science Education in an Age of Misinformation. I’ve never taught students how to evaluate the credibility of an online source before — and I’m nervous about doing it well — but I think it’s important to do, so I’m going to try.
Now I need to write the exams. (Yes, before the semester begins.)
I know what I want my students to be able to do by the end of the semester, but how will I get them there? Before I start populating a semester schedule with topics and exam dates, I need to know how I’m going to assess students’ ability to do the things I listed above. And really, my learning objectives are pretty terribly written — how does a student actually demonstrate that they can “seamlessly move through the Central Dogma?” — so designing my assessments now is a good way to force me to think about what each learning objective means. Once I have the assessments in hand, I can then use them to determine what types of practice the students need in order to meet each learning objective.
More on assessments in Part II.