High-School Biology Today and Tomorrow (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Part II: Objectives of Biology Education and Measurement of Achievement
Part II: Objectives of Biology Education and Measurement of Achievement
Pages 43-110
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PART II Objectives of Biology Education and Measurement of Achievement
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It is incumbent on us to re-examine why biology is important for most or all students and what we expect the benefits of biology education to be, both for the individual and for society at large. Several issues in the field of goals, objectives, and outcomes of biology education will need to be resolved as the Committee on High-School Biology Education addresses its tasks.
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These criteria raise issues for biology education that pervade all areas of our concern at this conference. If outcomes are to be determiners of curricula and evaluation, then the other subjects of this conference are derivative from the goals, objectives, or outcomes to be formulated as a major function of the committee.
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· Capacities for problem-solving and critical thinking in all areas of learning. · Innovative and creative thinking skills.
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The U.S. sample taking the biology test was drawn from 43 schools with a total of 659 students taking a second year of high-school biology.
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46~. A second year of biology may be inferred to be an advanced course for able students, but in the district in which I recently worked, a second biology course is offered for students who do not want to take chemistry or physics, but wish to take more science.
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From these two studies and from those reported by other panelists, I believe we can conclude that major reconsideration of the goals and objectives of high-school biology education and of methods of assessing student interests, achievement, and attitudes is important. EVALUATION IN lIIGH-SCHOOL BIOLOGY Schools and such courses as biology are continuously subjected to informal evaluation by their many publics: parents, students, administrators, teachers, scientists, business men and women, and national groups.
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As I looked over evaluation instruments for biology, I saw little change in the last 50 years. A few efforts, such as those of the Educational Testing Service (Dresser and Nelson, 1956)
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344. Laboratory work is considered to be an important and necessary means of enabling students to attain the essential goals of biology education, but assessment of any unique contributions of laboratory work is rare (Robinson, 1979~.
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1. Princeton, NJ.: Educational Testing Service, Cooperative Test Division.
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1978. Case Studies in Science Education.
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On the average, they had completed 1.9 years of previous biology courses. The first pair of questions, given in multiple-choice form, concern their ideas about sources of energy for plants and animals.
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Student responses: S1: This question cannot be answered because we have no idea of the amount of deer and wolves on the island and the time. S2: The deer will all die or be killed because of their white tails.
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These results led me to the position that I will take and elaborate on in this paper: Most students are not reaming anything useful in highschool biology courses. A few definitions of terms are in order here.
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The first arises from the fact that our present assessment system has declared these students to be successful biology students. They almost all graduated in the top half of their class, and they passed their previous biology courses.
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I haven't forgotten how to define "photosynthesis," even though my last biology course was before the last biology course of the students quoted above. The students studied reading and writing before they studied biology, but they haven't forgotten that.
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When test items are not revealed, it is difficult to assess how big a problem this is. Apart from the issue of whether our current assessment procedures actually measure what they purport to measure is the question of whether what they purport to measure is useful knowledge.
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Students studying for a test, or teachers preparing their students, are likely to ignore the rhetoric and be guided in their preparations by the form of the test itself. DEVELOPING BETTER ASSESSMENTS OF BIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING Criticizing current assessment practices is, of course, much easier than coming up with good alternatives.
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For example, although it is relatively easy to see that the students quoted above are deficient in formal biological knowledge, we wanted to go beyond that. We wanted to understand how they arrived at the responses that they gave.
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Describing students' knowledge involves recognizing the complex interrelationships among their ideas, including relationships that go outside disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, it appears that formal biological knowledge can truly be meaningful to beginning students only if they can relate it systematically to the many ideas about the living world (some correct, some incorrect)
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In our assessment procedures, we recognize the importance of the functions of scientific knowledge in the ways that we specify instructional objectives. The objectives always specify ways in which students should be able to use biological knowledge to describe, explain, predict, and control living systems.
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. the percentage of students who demonstrated mastery of each goal conception (Anderson and Smith, 1986; Anderson et al., in press; Bishop and Anderson, in press)
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66 E oa ~0 O (5 ~ O \ a)
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67 I 0- C~ ~/~ Gem ~ ~Z HIGH o ~ C ~ ~ ~ , llJ Q LIJ Q L 1 1 / In O Ocu !
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Although texts often present biological knowledge as consisting primarily of facts and vocabulary words, we are interested in how students could use biological concepts and principles as intellectual tools that help them to make sense of the living world. Thus, the outcome of our content analysis is a set of behavioral objectives specifying how students should be able to use knowledge of the topic to describe, explain, predict, and control the world around them.
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. CONCLUSION Most current assessment procedures, including both teacher-made and standardized tests, rely on techniques that emphasize efficiency and reliability.
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1988. Science Achievement in Seventeen Countries: A Preliminary Report.
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The program is intended to replace biology courses that would normally be taken at the freshman or sophomore level in college and is based on the premise that college-level material can be taught successfully to able and well-prepared high-school students. The AP biology course is open to any high school that elects to participate; similarly, the AP biology examination is open to any student who wishes to take it.
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Committee members bring to their tasks knowledge of biology curricula and of laboratory methods; they are cognizant of the abilities and understandings that are critical to mastery of biology and how students might be asked to demonstrate these abilities and understandings. COURSE DESCRIPTION The AP biology course is taught by high-school biology teachers with guidance from Advanced Placement Course Description Biology, a College Board publication prepared by the Development Committee.
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Any of these four questions may require the student to analyze and interpret data or information drawn from laboratory experiences, as well as lecture material; to design experiments; and to demonstrate the ability to synthesize material from several sources into a cogent and coherent essay. To allow students to show their mastery of laboratory science skills and knowledge, some questions in the multiple-choice section and one of the four essay questions may reflect the laboratory work and the objective associated with the AP biology laboratory exercises.
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Dissolved Oxygen and Primary Productivity FIGURE 1 College Board's advanced-placement biology course and laborato~y syllabus. From College Entrance Examination Board, 1988.
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A score of 5 indicates that a student is extremely well qualified to pursue upper-level college biology courses, whereas a grade of 3 indicates average preparation. RESULTS Over the last 10 years, the number of students taking the AP biology examination has increased by about 11% per year.
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Unfortunately, many more students are earning scores of 2 or 1. This increase in the percentages of students at 2 and 1 may be due to the addition of many new schools with novice AP biology teachers.
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Or Discuss Mendel's laws of segregation and independent assortment. Explain how the events of meiosis I account for the observations that led Mendel to formulate these laws [Educational Testing Service, 19883.
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Other longitudinal studies have shown good correlation between scores on the AP biology examination and subsequent grades in introductory and upper-level biology courses in college (Willingham and Margaret, 1986~. An area of current and future concern is the increasing percentages of students who score 1 or 2 on the examination.
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There Is also broad agreement that schools are the place where young people should get their scientific literacy and that formal institutions of education are failing to produce a minimal level of scientific literacy In an acceptable proportion -- r- _ _ of our young people. Most Americans, to borrow from the Declaration of Independence, find these truths to be self-evident.
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Further, it is clear to me that functional scientific literacy requires the ability to read about science and technology to be able to sustain literacy in the decades after the end of formal instruction. The basic problem is that formal instruction in science and mathematics has become voluntary in most American high schools and that attitudes have developed that discourage the vast majority of young Americans from attempting formal coursework in chemistry, physics, and mathematics beyond first-year algebra.
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It is likely that students scoring high on this index will be more likely to take advanced science courses and to engage in more informal science learning activities than students who score low. While we will have to await the second and third cycles of the LSAY for the individual change data to test that hypothesis, it is possible to use the base-year data to understand better the influence of home, school, and each student's life goals on his or her general attitude toward science.
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11 24 39 16 9 more positive attitudes and which students hold more negative attitudes. We would expect that students who hold positive attitudes toward science would be most likely to enroll in advanced science courses and to carry more information from their courses into adulthood.
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There appears to be no significant sex difference when parent education and student educational aspiration are held constant. Beyond enrollment, it is important to know- what each student thinks about the science courses to which he or she is exposed.
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Looking at the distribution of student attitudes toward science courses within the same parent education, student aspiration, student sex framework used to examine science-course enrollments, it appears that students expecting to complete a graduate degree hold the most positive attitudes toward science and that there are no systematic sex differences. While these multivariate tabulations are helpful in providing general impressions of the influence of each of these variables on the distribution of student attitudes toward science courses or toward science generally, we would like to know both the absolute and relative influence of each of these (and perhaps other)
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The trichotomous distribution of the index described earlier will be used in this model. In the preceding section, we identified student attitude toward science courses as the most proximate independent variable and looked at the distribution of student attitudes toward science classes.
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The inclusion of student course attitude, student educational aspiration, parent science push, parent religious attitudes, parent education, and student sex in a single model allows the exploration of the relative influence each of these measures in the context of the relative impact of all the other variables-on each student's general attitude toward science. A path model (Goodman, 1978; Fienberg, 1980)
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Student sex and student educational aspiration account for even smaller portions of the mutual dependence in the direct model. Parent education and parent
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Looking at the whole network of direct and indirect influences, it is clear that the level of parent education does play a significant but indirect role in influencing student general attitude toward science. The influence of parental education in fostering higher educational aspirations and in pushing science creates attitudes and goals that are conducive to liking science courses, which, in turn, appears to be strongly associated with a positive general attitude toward science.
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The absence of a path between student sex and student course attitude means that there was not a significant difference in science course attitudes between sophomore boys and girls, holding constant parent education, parent religious attitude, parent science push, and student educational aspiration. The path mode indicates that there are significant, but weak, relationships among parent religious attitude, parent science push, and student educational aspirations.
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In addition to the influence of science courses, the analysis indicated that parent science push and student educational aspirations also have significant, but far weaker, influences on students' general attitude toward science. The level of parent education has a substantial indirect influence on the later formation of student attitude toward science.
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Elements of Risk and Recovery. She was principal investigator for NAEP's study of higher-order thinking skills assessment techniques in science and mathematics and is serving on the advisory board for assessment for the National Center for Improving Science Education.
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In addition to highlighting the distribution of students across the five levels, Able 2 reveals large performance gaps between males and females and particularly between white students and their black and Hispanic peers. For example, half the males reached Level 300 in 1986, compared with only
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Also In keeping with results on the composite science scale, males performed better than females on the life-sciences subscale, although it is TABLE 3 Average Proficiency of Eleventh-Grade Students on the Life-Sciences Subscale, by Biology Course-Takin~a Percentage Proficiency Proficiency of Students of Students of Students Student Who Have Who Have Who Have Not Group Taken Biology Taken Biology Taken biology Male Female White rib. Black 88 (1.0)
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Able 3 also indicates that just as many females as males take biology in high school. However, while both male and female students who had completed biology performed significantly better on the life-sciences subscale than those who had not taken the course, sex differences in performance remained essentially unchanged, irrespective of biology course-taking.
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correctly identified a graph of the world's population growth. For the items described above, the response patterns for groups were similar to those shown on the life-sciences subscale overall: eleventhgrade males performed significantly better than females, and white students performed significantly better than either black or Hispanic students.
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As with performance on the groups of items previously described, however, there were significant differences in the performance of white, black, and Hispanic students on items pertaining to cell structures and functions. Genetics As made evident by their performance on items in this category, genetics was a relatively difficult area for the eleventh-grade students assessed.
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Although males and females performed similarly on questions related to genetics, white students tended to outperform their black and Hispanic classmates. Recombinant DNA research has produced a variety of organisms with big economic potential.
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Princeton, N.J.: National Assessment of Educational Progress, Educational Testing Service. National Assessment of Educational Progress.
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and the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT)
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Accordingly, the National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Science Teachers Association are collaborating on a project to develop a standardized test for high school biology. This objective, year-end test will be intended for first-year high school biology students and will address a core of basic biological concepts, processes, and thinking skills.
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Each question was reviewed by a college-level content specialist and a high-school biology teacher for validity and appropriateness. From the solicited questions, 120 3.
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TEST CONSTRUCTION Armed with more than 300 questions, the committee turned to the issue of test content. The following numbers of questions were agreed on: Concept Cell structure and function Bioenergetics Genetics Evolution Systems, physiology to morphology Ecology Mono my Behavior Science, technology, and society No.
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There was a strong interest by science teachers in using this test, and we have learned much from it. The committee made some minor revisions to correct misleading language in the 1987 test.
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New committee members will rotate on to the test committee to serve a 3-year term, the time it takes to build, field-test, and publish the test. Questions will continuously be sought from practicing high-school biology teachers.
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When the constructors of the national biology test received their item analyses, one of their most significant data sets was the percentage of students that chose each of the wrong answers. When one foil attracted a very large number of respondents, the obvious question always came up: Why?
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In 1988, the committee examined seven demographic questions relevant to performance on the high- school biology examination. Each of the questions was preceded onto the test forms by students in self-selected classrooms and analyzed by means of one-way analysis of variance at a 0.05 level of significance.
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Of the students in the sample, ninth-graders and eleventh-graders did significantly better than the tenth-graders who would normally be enrolled in standard-level biology classrooms. In analyzing the data further, we found that students who indicated that they "never" experienced laboratory work did significantly more poorly than those who did laboratory work "some of the time." The frequency of laboratory work was not an important factor.
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THE NABT-NSTA HIGH-SCHOOL BIOLOGY EXAMINATION 109 the questions themselves that seemed to elicit the most interest in the members, many of whom would rely on such a statement to guide their own choices. REFERENCE Mahadeva, M., and S
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