Exit Projects in Full Swing

The dilemma, of course, is that my primary focus this year is getting my students to pass the regents exam, and as I've stated ad nauseam before, I'm a little nervous about it, having no prior experience in teaching the curriculum and little or no support from the state of New York (as in the New York State Regents Living Environment Exam).(1) On the other hand, grade 8 students are supposed to also complete an 'exit project" which I have likewise discussed in earlier posts. To guide students properly through a year-long exit project is just a bit more than I can handle, so we are doing pared down projects that are really just getting started and are due on May 6th, at least as far as the students are concerned. In reality, I want all their research and data collection completed by May 6th, and if we take a little longer to get everything written up properly and presented, then maybe closer to May 20th for the final due date.

Most students are doing fairly simple projects - a good number of the old stand-by germination experiments, plant growth experiments, etc. Some students are taking my advice and reworking some of the experiments we already did in class (gelatin-detergent lab, e.g.), others are sticking with their secondary research projects on genetic diseases. What I expect from my regents classes is a solid experimental design, an extensive set of data, and a thorough understanding of the biology concepts to explain the data. I am giving them Mondays during class to work on projects as we continue with some pretty old-school lessons on human biology the rest of the week. Any other time they need will have to be after school. I will be collecting their experimental design diagrams later this week and post some specific examples, discussing how my expectations are different from what I've seen in similar other projects. Such as:

One group is investigating how salt affects plant growth. A pretty standard middle school science fair project, not very imaginative, not that exciting. Mostly this is done with a control group, a group that gets maybe a 5% salt solution, and a third group that gets a 10% salt solution, e.g. The 10% usually dies or doesn't grow at all, the 5% maybe lives but looks pretty sickly, and the control group does just fine. End of experiment. At this level, however, that would be a starting point. Now the challenge will be to go back and re-do the experiment with concentrations of salt between 0 - 5%, challenge them to find ANY concentration of salt that does not negatively affect plant growth. There are of course other directions the investigation could lead, such as looking for plants that are more resistant to salt, for example, but under the circumstances we will stay with the salt concentrations. Students will then have to discuss the physiological effect of salt on the plants. Why does salt harm the plants, maybe describe the role of salt in our own bodies, etc. You get the idea.

(1)References to curriculum matters here and here.

UPDATE

I neglected to mention that a sizeable chunk of the regents exams is related to understanding experimental design and the scientific process, so I realize that having students work on these projects is not taking away time that we need to prepare for the exam, it IS preparing for an important part of the exam. I am still struggling on the whole with how to integrate content & process over the long haul - I can do it in short bursts of activity, but putting it all together for a coherent year-long sequence of instruction is not easy.