PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AP ® Biology Visualizing Information Curriculum Module The College Board New York, NY About the College Board The College Board is a mission-driven not-for-profit organization that connects students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Today, the membership association is made up of over 6,000 of the world’s leading educational institutions and is dedicated to promoting excellence and equity in education. Each year, the College Board helps more than seven million students prepare for a successful transition to college through programs and services in college readiness and college success — including the SAT® and the Advanced Placement Program®.
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All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. Equity and Access Policy Statement The College Board strongly encourages educators to make equitable access a guiding principle for their AP® programs by giving all willing and academically prepared students the opportunity to participate in AP. We encourage the elimination of barriers that restrict access to AP for students from ethnic, racial and socioeconomic groups that have been traditionally underserved.
Schools should make every effort to ensure their AP classes reflect the diversity of their student population. The College Board also believes that all students should have access to academically challenging course work before they enroll in AP classes, which can prepare them for AP success. It is only through a commitment to equitable preparation and access that true equity and excellence can be achieved.1 Connections to the AP® Biology Curriculum.2 Connections to the AP Biology Exam.4 Instructional Time and Strategies.5 Lesson 1: Collaborative Drawing Illustrating the Concept of Emergent Properties.7 Melissa Manning, Peggy Skinner, Marilyn Smith Lesson 2: Modeling Evolution. 15 David Knuffke, Derek Mainhart Lesson 3: Visualizing Data.
25 David Knuffke, Derek Mainhart Summative Assessment. 34 Curriculum Module Summary. 45 Introduction Introduction All too often, we would like to pretend that the spheres of human creativity and inquiry are separated into neat domains, with clean dividing lines. Of course, we are kidding ourselves.
The scientist and the artist are united in their pursuit of human understanding. While the tools and methodologies employed are often different, both fields — art and science — look to create new knowledge about the human experience and our place within the larger world. This curriculum module provides a series of lessons that deal with the construction of visual models to help AP® Biology students understand the concepts within the curriculum framework. The usage of visual models in biological inquiry is a long tradition that predates the establishment of biology as a rigorous science (consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, or even Cro- Magnon cave paintings).
Modeling is intrinsic to the AP Biology Curriculum Framework as the foundation of Science Practice 1, indicating that it is a skill that students of all sciences are expected to be able to employ. It is not difficult to understand why this is the case. Through creating, analyzing, refining, and presenting models, the analytical, perceptual, and communication skills of the scientist are developed. And while models can take a variety of forms, visual models are particularly suited to the domains of biology.
The use of visual models in the biological sciences is widespread. Open a textbook or consult a research paper, and you will be presented with a wide variety and diversity of visual models to help explain the concepts that are being discussed. These models range in form from simple graphs to complex diagrams, but fundamentally, they are connected in their usage of visual modes of communication to demonstrate concepts and facilitate understanding. Unlike other curriculum modules, which may be typically organized around one particular unit of course content, this module is organized around one particular course concept that extends throughout its entirety.
This module presents a series of art-based tools and procedures to help students visualize concepts from the AP Biology curriculum framework, then present that information in a visually compelling way. The lessons provide a variety of artistic experiences, and stress different aspects of the modeling process at different points. We have provided a range of visual modeling techniques borrowed from the practices of artists, designers, and scientists, and applied these varied techniques to different areas of the curriculum framework for different reasons. At the same time, all of the lessons are unified in their application of visual models to help students understand and communicate aspects of the curriculum framework.
All of the lessons use the tools of artists and designers to help students refine their skills in visually modeling different types of understandings in a variety of ways. An obvious question that might be raised relates to the necessity of the lessons we provide, particularly in a course that is notoriously short on time: What is useful in presenting these concepts in a visual way that makes using these lessons in the AP Biology course a better use of class time than doing something else? 1 AP Biology Curriculum Module Certainly, different instructors will have different perspectives on the answer to that question. As to time constraints, we have not provided any lesson in this module that occupies a particularly large amount of instructional time. But more importantly, the module’s four lessons highlight curricular areas in which the use of visual models is more appropriate in aiding student understanding than using nonvisual techniques.
The concepts covered in this module range from information presentation and graphic design to bioenergetic, and evolutionary processes at work in the biosphere. In each case, spending some time having students model these processes in a visual context provides students with an opportunity to develop their understanding that would be lacking in a nonvisual context. Additionally, this module can serve as a resource for students who are interested in the visual arts and the connections between art and biology. Connections to the AP Biology Curriculum In creating this module, we have provided four different lessons that enable students to use creative, visual processes and practices to engage in modeling scientific phenomena, and scientific practices.
Modeling, and its uses, are firmly embedded in the AP Biology curriculum framework. Science Practice 1 states this explicitly, and makes plain the expectation that students will need to be able to create, describe, refine, use, and reexpress representations and models of natural phenomena and systems. The science practices are universal across all of the domains of scientific understanding that the AP program covers, and biology is certainly no exception. We have provided activities that touch upon three of the four Big Ideas of the course.
Lesson 2 asks students to model the effect of evolutionary forces upon a population of organisms by demonstrating how a particular mode of evolutionary change would affect the members of a population. In Lesson 1, students participate in the construction of a visual metaphor for the phenomenon of emergence within the context of contributing a section to a common work of art. Along with these two activities, which approach concepts from different big ideas, we have also provided an activity that connects the importance of visual modeling to the laboratory experience. In Lesson 3, students create graphical representations of laboratory data sets, and use the principles of graphic design to refine and improve their representations.
To help frame the curriculum connections in this module, we have identified the most pertinent connections to the enduring understandings and essential knowledge components of the curriculum framework at the beginning of each lesson. While we have identified the major connections, we do not wish to suggest any of these activities has to be restricted to the curriculum connections we have provided. The thematic nature of the curriculum framework lends itself to cross-pollination, and as such, instructors should not be discouraged in pursuing connections between these activities and aspects of the curriculum framework that may not be initially apparent. 2 Introduction Connections to the AP Biology Exam The AP Biology Exam requires students to understand and apply the content and concepts within the curriculum framework.
In this way, each lesson addresses aspects of the framework, and by extension, content or concepts on which students will be assessed when they take the AP Exam. The focus of the exam on assessing conceptual understanding requires students have a strong foundation in modeling (as indicated by the focus on modeling in Science Practice 1), to enable them to develop their conceptual understanding. Given the nature of this particular curriculum module, we have tried to provide novel activities that allow instructors to incorporate the use of visual modeling when teaching some of the major concepts of the course. A list of questions from the new sample exam that correlate to each of the lessons in the module is provided in Appendix E.
In focusing on evolution and bioenergetics, we are addressing two major content topics that are assessed on the AP Biology Exam every year. In presenting strategies for graphical presentation of laboratory data, we are addressing a science practice students are regularly expected to demonstrate on the AP Biology Exam. In investigating the phenomena of emergent properties in systems, we are giving students another way to think about a concept that comes up throughout the course, at all temporal and spatial levels of resolution. The development of student conceptual understanding and skills (via the science practices) in these areas is directly connected to the material and the application of the science practices that are assessed on the AP Biology Exam at the end of the year.
Instructional Plan Like the laboratory component of the course, the activities we present are firmly rooted in inquiry-based practice. In these lessons, students are asking and answering their own questions, or developing their own approach to the tasks that are presented. Instructors should have the requisite skill set to foster student inquiry, a skill set instructors are already expected to be utilizing in the laboratory component of the course. As presented, the activities provide a range of possible student responses, without any single, obviously correct approach or answer.
Instructors will need to facilitate student process, and help them to plan and implement their approach to these tasks. We have spotlighted a variety of junctions where instructors can elect to broaden or narrow the scope of student tasks as dictated by particular instructional circumstances. Any instructor who feels the need to gain some background understanding and fluency with the process of inquiry and questioning to facilitate learning is encouraged to consult the new 2012 AP Biology lab manual (AP Biology Investigative Labs: An Inquiry-Based Approach). The introductory material and appendixes have a large amount of discussion and supplementary resources devoted to these questions.
3 AP Biology Curriculum Module Another major area of knowledge instructors will need to bring to the table relates to the artistic/creative aspects of these lessons. We do not expect instructors to possess the same level of artistic talent as members of their schools’ art departments. Our goal is not to provide lessons that challenge the instructor with the level or amount of artistic material, but rather to spotlight four areas of the course where the incorporation of visual modeling can play a useful pedagogical role. In each of the lessons, we have provided instructor notes regarding the creative processes that are employed, along with options for broadening or narrowing the scope of these processes for instructional/student comfort level.
We have also provided a variety of relevant resources for these activities in the resource section of the module. Assessments Each lesson provides detailed information on formative and summative approaches to assessment within the structure of the lesson.