A New Curriculum for AP Biology

The College Board is rethinking the advanced placement exams, according to this New York Times article. After decades of overly-broad exams that cover anything imaginable within the scope of college-level introductory biology, the new exam will focus on fewer concepts.

A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. 

The scope of the new exam will be specified in a detailed curriculum (!):  

“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” [CB Vice Prez] Mr. Packer says.

An official curriculum for AP Bio is a very good thing. The point has been made in other places that, in the absence of a specified curriculum, the test dictates what will be taught. That seems to me to be what has happened with many of the AP subjects, as teachers try to fit a large slew of topics into a single course. An explicit curriculum circumvents that.

Other changes, I am not so sure will be for the better. The old labs are out--too boring and predictable! Now students do "a host of more creative, hands-on experiments [...] intended to help students think more like scientists." I'm not convinced that change simply for the sake of change is necessarily for the better. Take this example of a new lab:

The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them.

All too often, the emphasis in teaching shifts to process over content, and while an exercise such as the above is a good way to get students to appreciate the thought involved in designing a good experiment, I worry that the balance will shift too far from the content side of the equation.

The new A.P. Biology exams will be given for the first time in spring of 2013.

Experts Agree: It's the Curriculum, Stupid!

This past week has seen an unusual (and welcome) focus on curriculum--specifically, the issue that we often don't have one.


Kitchen Table Math links to this essay by Barry Garelick arguing that It Isn't the Culture, Stupid.

Asian countries routinely trounce the US in international comparisons of mathematical ability. Cultural explanations are often given--the U.S. can't do any better than we are doing because we lack a culture that values education, or that is willing to send kids to afterschool cram sessions. Garelick debunks this argument.

This Robert Pondiscio's essay, featured on the Fordham Institute's Gadfly, points out the obvious:

What I cannot accept, however, is that to focus on instruction—on curriculum and teaching—is to play the “wrong game.”  To accept this argument is to believe that the educational outcome of Jose or Malik in the South Bronx or Detroit is more deeply affected by who wins a primary for a House race somewhere in California than what they learn in school all day.  It is to believe that electing the “right people” matters more than what teachers teach and what children learn.

John Whorter writes at NPR's The Root about the effectiveness of direct instruction in teaching reading in closing achievement gaps.

The tragedy is that the discussion about black kids in school — boys as well as girls — takes place as if there were some great mystery about how to teach children from disadvantaged homes how to read. An entire plangent and circular conversation drifts eternally over a problem that, at least in the case of reading, was solved way back during the Nixon administration.

Back then, in the early '70s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation called Project Follow Through. It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results among 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading — based on sounding out words rather than learning them whole (phonics), and on a tightly scripted format emphasizing repetition and student participation — was vastly more effective than any of the others. And for poor kids. Including black ones.

And AFT's American Education devotes its entire winter issue to questions of curriculum. The blog Common Core covers AFT's article pointing out the dearth of solid research in support of "reform" math approached. They ask:

So why are so many American schools wasting resources and precious class time using reform curricula like Everyday Math that is based on an instruction-lite, discovery-driven approach to learning math?

So there you have it. Everybody and their sister, including the largest teacher's union, is coming out on the side of solid teaching and the importance of what is taught. Could this mean that an actual core curriculum lies on the horizon?