Thanks for watching our video Suzanne, glad we caught your eye. Currently we are working to support the remote implementations our research teachers have had to adopt due to covid-19. We plan to be able to support teachers who adopt the materials whether they are in the classroom or teaching remotely. This includes teacher guides and a teacher dashboard to track student progress. 

Our research is examining the kinds of connections across levels of biological scale that students learning with ConnectedBio are making, and we have been able to use our findings to improve the support for making these connections in our materials.  

We will be releasing the full curriculum to the public in July, and in fact we have two online activities available right now. Thanks for your comments.

Hi Susan, 

Thank you for your questions! As part of our focus was on connection, we developed several activities and functions within our lessons that scaffolded students' ability to bridge the scales. For example, we have students zoom from the mouse, into the melanocyte cell, and then to the membrane or nucleus. We also have probing and guiding questions along the way to call attention to the relationships between scales. 

To help the teachers, we have created a Teacher Edition of our lessons. This version looks like the student version, except it includes time-specific tips and strategies, background information, and exemplar student responses. The Teacher Edition also includes points in the lessons where we recommend a full group discussion and provides resources to aid teachers in facilitating these discussions. For our pilot years, we have had monthly PD sessions with our master teachers, where we provide timely support as they implement. We have not formalized a plan yet for scaling the PD when we release, but would definitely be open to suggestions on how to best do this. Some ideas thus far have been to create informational videos that supplement the Teacher Edition, or to have sessions at conferences. 

Hi, Jeffrey. 

Absolutely! You can preview the technology currently on our website, and if you sign up, we will email you when the release begins. We also have some mini-lessons available now, for those who do not want to wait until July. 

I agree - reliable online learning has become even more important in recent months. We have been having discussions on how we can best adapt our tool to make it even more usable for at-home learning. 

When we finish the Deer Mouse Case, we will be looking to expand to other phenomena. Perhaps food web analysis should be added to our list!

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your comment. We are very proud of what the ConnectedBio technology has shaped into over the course of this project. The ConnectedBio app or "Multi-Level Simulation" (MLS) has proven to be very powerful in providing students an environment to create this network of connected phenomena. (And it doesn't hurt that the mice are super cute!) The development team at the Concord Consortium has truly outdone themselves on this one!

From our observations in classrooms, students seem really invested in learning about the mice. As they talk, they bring up all sorts of interesting comments, which span several different types of levels (E.g. Should I get a mouse? Do mice have parents? Can we investigate the influence of the sun or diet on the mice?). In the early stages of the lessons, most students surmise that the environment and predation will be the driving factor in the evolution, and these features might even cause the cells of the mice to change in order to survive. With more experience, however, the students begin to see that DNA drives the process, with the environment and predation shaping which mutations are viable. From what we've seen in the pilot classrooms, conversation stays pretty on point. Students get engaged with the material, and explain things to each other. One student even used her hair to explain chromatin vs. chromosomes to her neighbor!

The interactive nature of the ConnectedBio app really allows students to bridge the technology with their hands-on experiences to create a multi-modal understanding of the fur color system.

Brian, Thanks for your comment-- and a wonderful compliment!
Theodore Dobzhansky's statement that "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," is a guiding principle. As we help students and teachers to make connections so that they can see evolution as the logical, emergent property of biological processes, we make science accessible and help people reason about diverse phenomena. Thanks for your observations.

Hi Ed,

Thank you for watching our video!

In one of our recent (remote) PD sessions with our master teachers, we brainstormed ways to help students develop their arguments using evidence in our lessons and activities. As this is a practice from NGSS, we have been looking for how to best incorporate it into our materials. Many of our master teachers use CER (claim-evidence-reasoning) with their students regularly, and use that language when also talking about the Deer Mouse, and that seems to transfer well.

That being said, we have built some of the CER structure into the materials itself, to scaffold the practice for students. For example, to start Unit 4, we have students make predictions about why some of the mice have a medium fur color, as opposed to the light and dark fur they have studied thus far. Then, we guide the students to use the multi-level simulation to explore the processes happening in a melanocyte cell of the medium colored fur, and determine what is causing its pigment production. We have the students compare what they found with their prediction, and then develop a model to express what they now know about medium fur color production. Finally, students describe their model as an explanation for what causes the medium fur. In this way, we guide students to develop their arguments based on facts, and provide them with both a simulation, and then a model, to use as they write up their answers. Some of our teachers have found that having the students compare models (by verbally explaining, not just showing) further engages students in thinking about the process of explanation and leads to stronger arguments.

In other words, while we don't formally introduce argumentation techniques in our lessons, we set up a structure for presenting arguments from evidence. This, along with teacher support, seems to be helping students to argue constructively.

 

Thanks, Kristin!

First off, you are a wonderful external evaluator and you help our team immensely.

Second, you are right. The part of our master teachers has been invaluable to the development of these lessons and activities. During the first pilot year, the teachers took notes after each lesson, highlighting where they found areas confusing and what they really enjoyed. We then compiled all their feedback into a central spreadsheet, which we shared with the team (researchers, developers, teachers) in our summer PD week. From here, we focused on the major points and set a priority list for what should be updated and what should be kept. For example, these discussions led to a clearer style of nomenclature for the alleles, and added showing some dead mice at the population level to clarify the concept of generations to the students. We also learn much from the implementations in the classroom. I, and others, have been fortunate enough to conduct classroom observations while the master teachers teach, and as we see how they incorporate the materials into the classroom, we create notes for the Teacher Edition of the materials to help future teachers implement. For example, sometimes the teachers add a manipulative, or frame a discussion question in a particular way that we document for others to do the same in the future. Because of the hard work the teachers, both in their reflections and in their implementations, I am more confident that our lessons and activities work not only in theory, but in practice. 

Hi David, 

Thanks for watching! Ah yes, the "force" misconception - We did anticipate this, and in fact, some of the early lessons and activities work to draw out this misconception, bringing it to the forefront. Unit 1 focuses on the environment and predation, and the class uses a Driving Question Board to highlight what students are wondering and thinking about for the relationship between fur color and these factors. We encourage teachers (in the Teacher Edition, an interactive online teacher guide) not to squash this misconception yet, but to let it linger and refer back to it as the lessons progress. In Units 2 and 3, students look closer at the proteins and DNA, and their opinions start to shift, as they wonder which factor drives which. In Unit 4, we move to inheritance, and here is when the conception makes a stronger shift, as they realize that fur color is strongly determined by the fur colors of the parents, via the alleles passed on through the gametes. By Unit 5, when they look at population genetics, students are pretty sold on the understanding that mutations in the DNA affect individual fur color, and the environment influences which mutations survive and thrive. 

Through careful scaffolding of the curriculum and thoughtful tips for teachers, we have observed that our lessons and activities are successful in revealing the misconceptions that students may have had prior to and during the early lessons of ConnectedBio. As students advance through the materials and build a network of connections across levels, they are able to articulate why their misconception was just that — a misconception.

Thank you for your kind words, Melissa! We certainly hoped that this technology-enhanced approach would encourage students to become more engaged in Biology as a discipline. While we have not done any formal research on whether our curriculum increases student interest or self-efficacy in science, we have certainly heard evidence that students find this curriculum engaging and enjoyable. Students have said things like "It's fun... it's more interactive than lecturing and a better way to learn." One student even said that the lessons and activities made him "feel like a scientist."

Hearing quotes like this from students tells us that we've made a difference in their experience in the classroom, and we consider that a major success. We're very excited to be able to share this curriculum with biology teachers in July 2020. If you're interested and haven't done so already, please sign up to be notified when the materials are available to the public!

Thank you for your kind words, Catherine! I will say the same for you and your efforts with A Medical Mystery. I really enjoyed watching your video and learning about the real-world examples you are using to encourage student-driven discovery with middle school students. I believe we are making similar strides in shaping wonderful resources for science education!

Thank you for your kind words, Rebecca! It's been a pleasure having you on our team of teachers. Not only have you allowed us to pilot our curriculum with your students, but your thoughtful feedback and insight from many years of teaching has helped us shape the ConnectedBio suite of materials into what it is today.

Hi Michael, thanks for asking! We have a few papers in progress and the first, which describes the curriculum and some of the reasoning behind the designs, has recently been submitted. So fingers crossed, we hope that it will be available before too long. ConnectedBio is not actually a game, so we do not have some of the metrics you mention that are more relevant to game play. However we do have user data on embedded assessments, from text-based to capturing the students’ models. Teachers have access to a dashboard where they can monitor student responses in real time, and students have a progress bar as well as a report feature so they can review their work easily and see if they skipped anything in the lesson. 

We have also recorded digital audio from students in small groups discussing how the factors they have focused on (at the various levels of scale) work together to explain the overall phenomenon of fur color that “matches” habitat. That analysis is currently being written up. In the coming year we plan to gather additional data, and anticipate focusing on what can strengthen remote implementations, for obvious reasons.

Great question, Jennifer. We are very eager to provide ConnectedBio to all schools and particularly to schools with few resources. “Resources” can refer to the ability to provide hands-on experimentation, and/or to provide digital devices. Even in schools with hands-on facilities, supporting students in bridging the levels of scale involved in evolutionary processes is critical to understanding, and is made accessible by technology. Infusing the levels of scale with interactive, data-rich experiences is what we are aiming for.

It is disturbing that there is a digital divide to begin with, but we strive to make our materials as accessible as possible to schools with lower tech resources. First, we make sure that our activities work on Chromebooks, which are some of the least expensive, most used laptops in schools these days. Second, many schools use iPads or other tablets and part of our July release goal has been to make the activities touch-compatible. As of this week, we are piloting a touch device version of the curriculum with one of our research group teachers whose school, in an under-resourced area, provides students with iPads. We expect to learn much from this implementation about helping to support remote implementations with touch devices. Other research teachers are implementing remotely on laptops, so we will also learn from them.

We will be releasing the full ConnectedBio curriculum in July, including Teacher Editions that provide in-context tips, explanations, background, and exemplar responses to questions overlaid on the online activities. We will "advertise" ConnectedBio widely through our email and newsletter mailing lists with links to our materials at the Concord Consortium’s STEM Resource Finder and https://connectedbio.org. (Note that activities and accounts are always free of charge.)  We have recently submitted an article to a practitioner journal in order to reach more classrooms by reaching more teachers. 

Finally, the ConnectedBio materials could be used in a whole-class interactive manner by projecting the simulation to the class and taking direction from the students as to how to explore, based on the activity’s suggestions and questions. Of course this approach will have to wait until our current situation with the pandemic is resolved.

Thanks Jennifer!