{"id":4753,"date":"2014-11-11T20:27:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4753"},"modified":"2014-11-11T20:45:12","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T02:45:12","slug":"an-alternative-method-for-assessing-student-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4753","title":{"rendered":"An Alternative Method for Assessing Student Understanding?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my experience, students have the some difficulty in understanding things in Biology which are not easily observable. When you mix in heavy doses of chemistry and a fair amount of process-specific vocabulary, cellular energetics may be the most challenging of all the topics I cover on a regular basis. With the NGSS an increased emphasis is placed on knowing the overall purpose of the systems and their inputs and products, but I still always struggle with what is important for students to know, and how best to get them to retain that information. There are some great labs available using leaf disks<\/a> and probes<\/a>, and there are always notes, repetition and memorization of course. But you still run into the same issue… students have to accept that things are working the way that you tell them that they should. And while it isn’t feasible on a normal high school budget to visualize the cellular processes that are occurring in the energy reactions, there is another option: role-playing.<\/p>\n

I was trolling the internet one day, looking for a better alternative to showing my students some “interactive” PowerPoint slides, when I remembered a competition<\/a> I tried to peer pressure my wife into entering, Dance Your PhD<\/a>. A quick Google search, provided me with the catalyst that I needed for my favorite day of the first semester, and my favorite TED talk yet.<\/p>\n