There were major changes to the Advanced Placement Biology program:
The curriculum created was submitted and approved by The College Board—a requirement for offering the course at Bethel High School.
The content of the course is designed such that “Big Ideas,”“Enduring Understandings,”“Essential Knowledge,” “Science and Engineering Practices,” and “Learning Objectives” are identified.
The “Big Ideas” include:“Diversity and Unity of Life,” “Energy Transformations within Biology,” “Living Things Respond to their Environment,” and “Biological Systems Interact.”
The revised curriculum focuses on promoting the enduring, conceptual understandings and the content that supports it.
The curriculum contains much less of a focus on factual recall and spends much more time on inquiry-based learning of essential concepts including the collection and evaluation of data.
No additional curriculum topics were included.Specific details within each “Big Idea” have been removed to emphasize the conceptual understanding of biology.
The course requires the implementation of 12 embedded labs designed to give students the opportunity to apply the Science and Engineering Practices.
Summary of the Briefing: The new Advanced Placement Biology curriculum is fully compliant with the College Board’s prescribed requirements.
There were major changes to the Advanced Placement Chemistry program:
The content of the course is designed such that “Big Ideas,” “Enduring Understandings,” “Essential Knowledge,”“Science Practices,” and “Learning Objectives” are identified.Each of these is supplemented with specific classroom activities which are enumerated in the curriculum document.
The course focuses on promoting the enduring, conceptual understandings and the content that supports them.
The course focuses much less on factual recall and much more on inquiry-based learning activities designed for understanding the essential concepts.
The course requires that at least 6 inquiry-based labs are included in the curriculum.This helps develop the “science practices” which are a specified part of the curriculum.
Certain concepts, such as knowledge of organic functional groups and Colligative properties of solutions are considered “beyond the scope of this course” because it is assumed that this is all covered in college chemistry courses.
The course requires that, throughout the year, students are engaged in the knowledge and skills that help them collect data, analyze this data, and apply it in order to capture important aspects of the work that scientists are engaged in.
The curriculum created was submitted and approved by The College Board—a requirement for offering the course at Bethel High School.
Summary of the Briefing: The new Advanced Placement Chemistry curriculum is fully compliant with the College Board’s prescribed requirements.
There were substantial changes to the Chemistry 31 and 32 courses:
The addition of essential questions to each unit.
To address missing curriculum units because of the loss of physical science at the high school, three additional units on polymers, electricity and magnetism, and acids/bases were added to the chemistry curricula.The units are designed as problem-based units where students are presented with a real-life problem they will have to solve.They must use collaboratively-performed research and utilize experimentation to guide them toward their answers.
To meet the needs of the new Framework for K-12 Science Education, each unit was designed to focus on one or two specific science practice(s).(There are eight Science and Engineering Practices.)
A chart was created (pgs. 12, 13) showing how each unit aligns with the Practices, Cross-cutting Concepts, and Disciplinary Core Ideas set forth by the Framework for K-12 Science Education.
A new pacing guide (pgs. 14, 15) was created reflecting the changes in the curriculum.
To meet the requirements of the CCSS on Literacy standards, each created unit consists of at least one reading activity beyond the textbook.
To meets the requirements of the CCSS College and Career Readiness standards, each unit consists of at least one collaborative activity.Numerous activities in each unit require the use of technology.
The assessments that will be utilized by each teacher were included as a chart (pgs. 16-21) to the document including what each assessment measures, how often it will be administered, the type of assessment it is, who will analyze the results, and what the results should tell a teacher.
All activities, articles, and assessments that are electronically saved have been placed on the chemistry share folder on the school server.
Additional online resources that both students and teachers can utilize were identified and included to the document (pgs. 21-23).
Summary of the Briefing: The new Chemistry 31 and 32 curricula were changed in order to address the Common Core Literacy Standards and the Science and Engineering Practices, the Cross-Cutting Concepts, and the Disciplinary Core Ideas found in the Framework for K-12 Science Education—which is the basis for the Next Generation of Science Standards (2012).
