Dr. Louise Mead is the Education Director at the BEACON Center at MSU, and Dr. Alexa Warwick is the Evolution and Outreach Postdoc at the BEACON Center at MSU. Their talk was titled "ConnectedBio Curriculum: Three-Dimensional Learning from Molecules to Populations." 

Abstract

Students are often taught evolution isolated from genetic and cellular mechanisms. In reality, a complete understanding of evolution requires knowledge spanning many biological sub-disciplines and levels. To address this issue, the ConnectedBio project team (MSU, Concord Consortium) is developing a set of technology-enhanced lessons for high school biology that meet national science standards. We hypothesize that thoughtfully integrating the practices of science with disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts will support students’ development of a network of connected biological concepts that students can use to make sense of evolutionary phenomena.  We use the evolutionary phenomena from the previously developed Evo-Ed cases as the basis for the curriculum. Here we present our curriculum development work to date, some initial survey data on student explanations of evolutionary change across levels of biological organization, and plans for evaluating student conceptual models during Spring 2019 curriculum piloting.