Guest Blogger

Annie Chien is a high school science teacher of regents living environment at School of the Future in lower Manhattan. I have known Annie for a couple of years now, beginning with a class we found ourselves in at CCNY (Evolution). I had not seen Annie since that class, but after I subscribed to the NSTA Biology Listserv (NSTA members only - login required), her name started appearing in my e-mail box as she commented on various questions people had posed on the listserv. Annie stumbled upon my blog and and we have begun talking about regents living environment and some of the issues it poses in terms of, e.g., constructivism and inquiry. She has been teaching the course for six years now, and I welcome her input. I have asked Annie to be a guest blogger here, which she has graciously accepted. I will let her spell out any other professional/personal information she would like to share. Look for her post early this coming week.

Welcome Annie!

Humane Treatment Revisited

(Original Post on Humane Treatment)

After e-mail discussions with Tony Galitsis, retired teacher, science ed specialist, founding member and still active partipant of the New York City Science Coordinator's Network (hope I got all that right), I googled "ASPCA humane treatment schools" and lo & behold, up came Article 17 of New York State Law on humane treatment of animals.

The ASPCA version of New York State Law Article 17 has a little more information, but not much, and indicates it is current as of 2000, amended in 1994. It also includes some common sense guidelines for treatment of animals kept in classrooms as pets or for simple observational studies. They have a printer friendly version as well.

Tony is less optimistic than I am that elementary & middle school students, or teachers for that matter, can carry out animal experiments properly. As I was formulating an argument in favor of such experiments, I found myself thinking maybe he has a point. I still think an outright ban would be going too far (which Tony wasn't suggesting either), whether by school or district administrators, but perhaps some kind of formal review process would be appropriate. This would increase the liklihood that only serious and meaningful studies would be carried out, decrease the chances of inhumane practices taking place.

At this point, however, any such process would probably have to come from the school or district (region in NYC) level.

Elsewhere on ASPCA Website:

Animals in the Classroom: A short article on things to consider and basic guidelines.

Midterm (Regents) Exam Results

Regents Living Environment Exam June, 2004 Version

Average Scaled Score*: 50



High Score: 70



Low Score: 24



Number of passing scores: 1



Mode: 48



Median: 53



Number of test takers: 53 (out of 60 - make-ups not yet given)

*Scaled score is the score that counts in the sense that it is the raw score (out of 85 possible points) converted to the 0-100 scale we are all familiar with, 65 representing a passing grade in most places.

Not the results I had hoped for, but not unexpected for January, half-way through the curriculum. An average of 50 is at the low end of my range of expected outcomes. A lot of questions on this particular exam revolved around genetics and Human Body System/Homeostasis, which are coming up in the curriculum. It was definitely more difficult than the practice version we looked at in class earlier (June 1999).

Still, I expected a few more to pass the exam outright - a couple came close with 63 and 64. A lot of students in the 50's range - actually a distinct clustering at the 48-56 range (29 students), and that represents a range of only 7 raw score points out of 85. I certainly have hope now that everyone who puts his/her mind to can pass this exam in June. A lot of students continue to be confused by the wording of questions and the (non-science) vocabulary can throw them off at times. By June, they will have most of the major content areas covered and they will have seen the exam a couple more times, which means they should be more comfortable with it.

The low score of 10 is really bothersome. 10 points could easily be had by simply marking all the multiple choice questions with a B or C. This student clearly put no effort into the exam, leaving all the short answer items blank. Looks like time to call mom.

Student Blogs

I have finally started a list of student blogs on this page.

I have assigned the blogs for extra credit, with a bonus this marking period for starting the blog and making the first post. So far I have 4 blogs listed. Others have set up their blogs but not posted. Still others are awaiting computer time to set up their blogs.

Here's how the credit works after the initial set up. I will award 1 point for each entry either on your own blog or commenting on another person's blog. The points are added to students' homework scores until they get to 100. After that I start adding onto class participation grade, then quizzes, and so on. The idea is to get students talking to each other about science outside of class. Of course I have to lay down the guidelines and discuss etiquette. Most of the guidelines have already been formulated, it's just a matter of making sure again that everyone understands. You can find the rules here that I posted last year when I was just piloting the idea. You can also find the parental consent forms I am using here.
Of course the current concept is a lot different. I had originally wanted to have a single blog for the entire class, but I abandonded that idea because it depended too heavily on me providing activities and links to the students.

I thought they might be a little more motivated if they had their own personal blogs. I even allow them to write about other topics, but they only get science credit for science posts - everything else is for their own personal enjoyment. I may assign specific questions that I want students to address at various points throughout the rest of the year.

Humane Treatment of Animals

UPDATE: See this post for more info.

New York State Consolidated Laws: Education: Article 17: S 809.Instruction in the humane treatment of animals (Scanned by me - not found on internet)

At the recent professional development session at the Bronx Zoo, a number of teachers asserted that students were not allowed to perform any experiments that involved animals. This was based on information passed down from science coordinators or science supervisors in the school or district.

Just to clear the air a little bit. It may well be that an overzealous administrator mis- or over-interpreted the law, but the law of New York State does not forbid animal experiments provided animals are treated humanely and not seriously harmed. I have never heard of nor seen any New York City or Department of Education regulations that are any more strict than NY State. Here's a quote from the pertinent paragraph (formatting altered for readability):

5. Treatment of live vertebrate animals.

a. Except as provided for in this subdivision, no school district, school principal, administrator, or teacher shall require or permit the performance of a lesson or experimental study on a live vertebrate animal in any such school or during any activity conducted under the auspices of such school whether or not the activity takes place on the premises of such school where such lesson or experimental study employs:

(i) micro-organisms which cause disease in humans or animals,
(ii) ionizing radiation,
(iii) known cancer producing agents,
(iv) chemicals at toxic levels,
(v) drugs producing pain or deformity,
(vi) severe extremes of temperature,
(vii) electric or other shock,
(viii) excessive noise,
(ix) noxious fumes,
(x) exercise to exhaustion,
(xi) overcrowding,
(xii) paralysis by muscle relaxants or other means,
(xiii) deprivation or excess of food, water or other essential nutrients,
(xiv) surgery or other invasive procedures,
(xv) other extreme stimuli, or
(xvi) termination of life.

Pretty common sense regulations. Don't abuse the animals. Do the research ahead of time to find out what ranges of conditions the animal can tolerate without adverse effects. Conduct your studies within that range. When in doubt, and no information can be found, reconsider the experiment.

The only references I can find to NY City guidelines can be found in the New York City Board of Education Science Safety Manual. No prohibitions against animal studies are to be found in this document. I sincerely invite anyone to find contradictory information in writing from the state, city, or department of education.

Exit Projects & Midterms

I'm now seriously considering having students turn their genetic disorder reports into an "exit project." They are already doing quite a bit of research and we have spent a lot of class time on the projects. It would only be a small stretch to now focus on finding data that would justify calling their work a "Secondary Research" project that qualifies as an exit project. It's not my idea of a perfect project - the data part will be quite limited - but it's at least as good as some of the examples given in the NYC Exit Project Booklet (Warning - badly scanned by DOE).

I was developing the rubric for their projects this morning and realized how close they were to having a project that satisfies the formal exit project requirement. That would take care of one of the many burdens my regents students face - and they would be finished without even realizing they had finished it! We could then focus more of our energy on the "important" stuff like completing our labs and passing the exam. You can download my rubric here. It's a modified version of our old district 6 project rubrics.

On another note, I've decided to administer an old Regents exam as their midterm - the entire thing. This will give them a sense of the scope of the exam and the language they have to get used to - they always complain that I use such big words when I talk, wait till they start reading the regents exam! I plan to give them two scores.

First, I will let them know what their score would be if this were the real thing and they had to take the exam today - considering we are only half way through the school year, a real score of 65 would be nice (that's a raw score of 41 out of 85 possible points on the January 02 exam). In reality, many of the ecology concepts on the exam were taught in grade 7 plus many of the questions can be answered just by paying close attention to the questions and thinking, so I'm hoping that most students will be close to the 65 score.

I will then take their real scores and distribute them on a curve for a score that will go in my record book and be recorded on their report cards as the midterm exam grade. I expect that real score of between 50 - 65 to be the average for my two classes. Then again maybe I'm in for a serious letdown. Either way, the results will affect my decisions about what to do with the remainder of the school year. I've been worried for some time that we are not making enough progress. I hope this practice exam puts my mind to rest. If not, I may have to change tactics and get much more structured in my approach.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Urban Advantage

I was asked last week to help “facilitate” some of the professional development sessions for Urban Advantage (UA). This is a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and the New York City Science institutions – The Bronx Zoo, American Museum of Natural History, Hall of Science, Botanical Gardens, etc. You might think such an effort involving over a million dollars in funding from the city council might have some online information, but at the moment such information is lacking so I can’t link to any sites.

I am working for three Saturdays with the Bronx Zoo sessions. A team of about 10 or so science teachers from different school regions is hosted by the zoo, instructed by a zoo scientist, Jennell Ives. She is very knowledgeable and competent, which is as one might assume for an undertaking such as this. As science facilitator in district 6 a couple of years ago, I was always impressed with the scientists we worked with at the Museum of Natural History who offered their expertise to help teachers. This is my first exposure to a scientist working at the zoo and I can only hope that all the other institutions have such a great instructor.

The main focus of the initiative is helping teachers utilize the science institutions to help students in grade 8 complete their “exit projects.” My regents students are also expected to complete an exit project in addition to all the other demands, which have been alluded to in earlier posts. The term “exit project” is an unfortunate one, because it is really part of a larger requirement that students complete a long-term scientific investigation every year, pretty much from kindergarten through high school. The “exit” part was added a few years ago really as an escape hatch for students with failing grades in science who might nonetheless be allowed to “exit” anyway with an acceptable project completed. It’s a bit convoluted, since no one is ever kept back based solely on science grades anyway, so why the need for an escape mechanism is entirely unclear to me. Perhaps because of this, the real intent of the projects was never really articulated to anyone’s satisfaction and repeated requests by science coordinators to get the Board of Ed to clarify what exactly it wanted from these “exit projects” were never answered.

Nonetheless, we are all pretty much unanimous in our agreement that long term investigations – such as controlled experiments, field studies, secondary research, and design projects – are a worthwhile and important part of science education. So we promoted and pushed the concept at the district for a long time. Back in the day (before the Bloomberg/Klein regime) our district (6, in collaboration with 5 & 3) pretty much dropped the “exit project” name and instituted project requirements for grades 5-8, incorporated into our curriculum frameworks along with content objectives derived from the NY State Core Curriculum.. Unfortunately, now that this city-wide endeavor has begun with much fanfare, the term exit project was picked up again and we seem to be stuck with it unless the UA initiative is expanded next year, when the parties involved will have to grapple with what to call the projects once they start getting 5th, 6th, and 7th graders involved.

I was impressed with the the participants, the instructor as noted above, and of course the zoo is a great place to visit. I managed to snap a nice picture of the Inca tern, Larosterna inca, in a very large open air (outdoor) aviary.

DNA Extraction

I had planned to extract DNA from wheat germ. I went through the hassle of finding raw wheat germ (as opposed to toasted, which just about every grocery store has). Two local health food stores didn't carry the raw stuff, the local grocery stores don't carry it. I wound up at the Whole Foods store in the new Time Warner building at Columbus Circle. The wheat germ was actually rather inexpensive at about $1.69 for a 12oz(?) box. I gathered all the other essential elements of the lab. Then someone posted a fairly simple protocol for extracting DNA from cheek cells on a listserv that I subscribe to, so I decided to give that one a try (picture below).

The only real purpose I can see to these labs is to de-mystify DNA a little and generate a little excitement at the same time about it. There's something neat about being able to "see" this stuff and know that it came from your cells and it's just this substance found naturally in all living things. It's not magic powder, it's this goopy, clumpy, stringy white stuff in our cells. My hope is that they will be really intrigued and want to know more about how this funky-looking material determines our traits.

I gave students a choice of following the wheat germ protocol or the cheek cell. It was kind of nice to have the two being followed at the same time for comparison, but it certainly complicated the distribution of materials and discussion of the two protocols.

What administrators don't understand about teaching science

I teach in a school that is probably not unlike many others. We have no real science labs, science is taught in whatever rooms are available for the programmer to put us in. We are a large school: In my grade (8) there are about 5 teachers with about 4 classes each (on average - in reality we teach a split schedule between grade 8 plus at least one other grade, but that's another story. The point is there are about 5 grade-8 teachers and about 20 grade-8 classes!). There are a small number of classrooms (about 3) for each grade that were originally designed as science rooms, but the science part (running water, gas lines, lab stations, etc) were dismantled many years ago. Nonetheless, because they are near the science supply rooms and relatively large, they are at least more desirable than other classrooms in the building. Unfortunately most of those rooms are in fact not used for science but rather as regular classrooms for English, Math, or Social Studies classes. One of the supply rooms was turned into an administrative office. I am lucky enough to teach in one of the "science" rooms.

I'm also lucky enough to be teaching regents biology which provides some guidelines, specific content objectives, and some required labs. It is still not what I consider a "curriculum" and demands a tremendous amount of planning from teachers. The labs, being at a higher level than many of the middle school labs, also require a lot of prep time and a lot of materials, some rather specialized. The DNA lab needs water within a somewhat narrow temperature range (50 - 60 Celsius), test tubes with covers, long stirring sticks, alcohol, and a few other items. All need to be prepared in such a way that 30 students (yes, 30 students) can use them at 5 different tables with a minimum about of spillage or breakage. On top of that, materials usually have to be distributed AFTER students arrive, because the room is used throughout the day by other classes and cannot be arranged at the tables before students enter. Likewise, materials have to be collected at the end of the period because the classroom will again be used by another teacher (for social studies or English) with another class. Now think about making sure all the tables are cleaned after doing cheek cell labs and other biology related activities! For my 7th grade class I have to travel to three other rooms on a different floor. This is pretty typical this year for most of my colleagues, in fact my program is great compared to others. Not exactly my idea of an ideal working environment for science teachers. As you might suppose, we have an incredibly high turnover rate for teachers in general, and - it seems to me at least - science teachers are particularly difficult to find and keep.

Back to the DNA Extraction Labs

If you are thinking of doing one of these labs, don't sweat the details. I used saltwater for the mouth rinse, which may have been unnecessary: I misread the protocol and I remembered using saltwater in a class when I did the cheek cell extraction, so I guess I didn't read that part too carefully. I must say it gave me some perverse pleasure to see the students suppressing their gag responses to the saltwater! I also tried following the correct protocol using tap water as the mouthwash and adding saltwater later. Both methods yielded neat samples of DNA. I was pretty imprecise with the liquid detergent, and didn't have any problems. Wheat germ does indeed give oodles of DNA.

The biggest problem my students had was following the protocol alone and not waiting for me to tell them what to do, or insisting I tell them at every step if it was OK now to do the step. I will take some blame for that. It isn't that often that I give them written assignments or open-ended activities and let them struggle through it on their own. (Note to self...)

The other problem was pouring the alcohol into the test tube gently without letting it mix into the saliva or the wheat germ mixture. The cups I gave them for pouring didn't work so well, probably because of the low surface tension(?) of the alcohol which leads it to spill easily, even from beakers - in trying to avoid spills they poured too fast and mixed everything up. It was a bit of a messy lab, but I think a lot of fun for the kids, and I hope a nice starting point for getting into the details of DNA in the coming couple of weeks.

Lab Lists

Lab list for the next few weeks. Details will be posted as we go along. This is just an overview to keep me focused. Some labs are available online and I have provided links. Others I will devise myself.

These next few weeks are a little tricky. I have to prepare my students for the grade 8 exam, plus get them ready for midterm exams, plus keep moving forward with the content and the labs for regents. At this point we have almost 600 minutes of lab time, which is not where I would like to be. I will need to step up the pace a little in the third marking period so there will be plenty of time for tying things together and test prep in May/June.

1. Microscopy – Introduction/Review, looking at plant & animal cells and various human cells, estimating size with grids. This has to be made from scratch, and depends on what materials I can get my hands on at school or by ordering.
2. Extracting DNA – A “throwaway” lab, more of an attention getter than anything else. I may work some scientific method into it – manipulating a variable and measuring the amount of DNA that can be extracted.
3. Dichotomous Keys – A review for the middle school exam (end of January), also a skill included in the Living Environment curriculum. I’ll probably use past activities for this one.
4. Making Connections – required lab - NY State
5. Digestive System Model – a “design” project. Students will use readily available materials to build a model of the digestive system.
6. Return to mealworms for students who are interested in doing an exit project with them – I won’t force this one on anyone.
   

Completed Labs

1. Yo! Where’s my Peanut – a dinky "close-looking," observation activity.
2. Black Box/Mental Models Lab – mystery in a box, develop mental model using observations.
3. Finches' beaks – NY State Required Lab
4. Mendel’s Peas Simulation - this one didn't go so well, mainly because I messed up the ratios myself!
5. Alien Heredity
6. Mitosis with Pipe Cleaners
7. Osmosis Through an Egg Membrane