It’s a fact of science that new discoveries are made all the time. Shakespeare wrote what he wrote, so a study of Shakespeare might just as well have been written a hundred years ago, but we were reminded about a month ago by the folks at the super-collider at CERN in Geneva that things we once thought we knew were not true at all. Biology is such a fast-changing science, and in response to that aspect of science, the College Board has developed a new biology course framework, available here.
They have also developed new Latin and Spanish literature frameworks, so biology isn’t anything special, and to be honest, these things also change from time to time.
Anyway, the new framework is available from the College Board, and according to a tweet by Trevor Packer, the College Board’s head of AP testing, “1201 AP Biology teachers to date have sent their syllabus; 1133 have been approved (including 526 who simply used 1 of the sample syllabi).”
According to the College Board, the revised course shifts “from a traditional ‘content coverage’ model of instruction to one that focuses on enduring, conceptual understandings and the content that supports them. This approach will enable students to spend less time on factual recall and more time on inquiry-based learning of essential concepts, and will help them develop the reasoning skills necessary to engage in the science practices used throughout their study of AP Biology.”
Sounds good! The course also adds two question types to the test, which is happening in several other subjects this year as well: short-answer free response, and gridded response. It makes the tests easier for a computer to score, basically, holding down the costs of administering the tests.
But most importantly, the ongoing effort, led by the National Science Teachers Association (link), to bring inquiry-based learning to our science classrooms is a good one. Rather than recalling a whole bunch of facts, the revised course provides examples of key “big ideas” that teachers may choose to use or allow students to find their own. The new course was designed to make students and teachers feel less burdened with the recalling of facts themselves and more focused on applying those facts to new situations and scenarios they encounter in the real world. After all, that’s what science is.