This past week I have struggled with my regular biology class in finding ways for them to be more engaged and motivated to study the material that they have a unit exam on (on Tuesday!). I know that the material is a little difficult to wrap your head around because it requires a great deal of visualization and conceptual/logistical knowledge to fully understand. Mitosis and Meiosis seem like topics that will forever be one of those topics that students either get or don't get the first time that they encounter it.
The reason I have been frustrated is because I don't know how to make it better for my students. They took a quiz on the material, and many of them did poorly so I gave them the opportunity to make corrections for 1/2 credit (only a handful took advantage of the opportunity) and we continued to review the material. About a week later, they were given almost the exact same quiz and much to my surprise and demise, 1/2 of them did worse than they had the first time around. So, kind of at a loss for words as I collected the quizzes, I asked my students for suggestions of what I could/should do to help them learn the material. Many of them mentioned games, more visuals, and hands-on activities but after having spent nearly 3 weeks on those 2 topics my bag of tricks for Mitosis and Meiosis had already begun to run dry. Even my mentor appeared to be at a loss but having taught the topic many times before, she was unsurprised and tried to encourage me to understand that the nature of the topic was one that many students will just not understand. This sort of just frustrated me more because I felt that there had to be a way.
As their unit exam looms closer, I am determined to make the most of the last day - but I realize that it is a little late to remedy things for this unit. Hopefully the next unit (on DNA replication) will go better. I have some fun activities and visuals for them lined up but I feel that I need to be even more innovative in how I approach the topic given how the last unit went.
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Ms. Liu,
ReplyDeleteDo not give up, it is a difficult concept. I find it especially difficult because we set clearly defined stages to something that is truly a continuum of change with a few indicators that select something into one stage or the other. Students have a difficult time reconciling this idea. The best way I have found to help (and it is still flawed) is a flip book or claymation. If students have to construct an animation sequence that represents the process you will have a quick check to see if they understand the process. Then you could show the product to the entire class and any students that are not quite there could get student feedback to see where they tripped up. I made a simple animation with 18 or so slides that students really enjoyed. You can see it at my blog under the November 2007 post
http://504russell.blogspot.com/
Right above my November post in my October post I have a complete lesson planned out for it. You can find the mitosis flip book activity at
http://sciencespot.net/Media/mitosisbook.pdf
Also, Ms. Lawes has a great Mitosis Manipulation lesson that seemed to be very engaging.
I hope this helps, there is a good chance you already did these, but if you have not maybe try them next year.
Best,
daver