Action Research Brainstorm

    Looking back on my time as a student learning biology, I would say the most difficult content areas for me were diversity of life and genetics. Learning genetics for the first time was confusing primarily because genetics involves a lot of probability, and I didn’t have a proper probability and statistics course until after I had taken biology in high school. My limited understanding of probability therefore made pedigrees and dihybrid crosses a bit more challenging than they needed to be.

Diversity of life, on the other hand, is a unit that gave me much more trouble, and for entirely different reasons. Part of the reason I struggled with diversity of life is the sheer amount of memorization involved. This particular unit includes learning the various ways we classify species, the anatomical features that differentiate those species, and how closely related those species are evolutionarily. Memorizing the features that differentiate groups of organisms was difficult for me because I had very little prior knowledge in that area. Not only was I unaware of my everyday exposure to protists, fungi, and prokaryotes, I didn’t cover life diversity in elementary school or middle school to the same degree as ecology, cell biology, molecular biology, and human anatomy and physiology. Outside of some very basic animal and plant biology, I didn’t cover life diversity in depth until high school and college.

    When learning about diversity of life, my teachers typically introduced the oldest species first, bacteria and archaea, and progressed through different species or groups based on the major evolutionary advances that arose. For example, one of the first innovations that separated green algae from the first plants that penetrated land was the development of the cuticle, which allowed plants to retain water. Vascular tissue evolved later as a means for plants to distribute water without needing to be bathed in it, further removing vascular plants from algae and bryophytes. While this is a logical approach to differentiating species and learning about the evolution of modern organisms, there is a lot of information to learn, and evolution does not always follow a logical path. Analogous structures, ancestral similarities, and polyphyletic grouping can make species classification a nightmare for any student. If the information to be learned is simply presented as a list of facts, students will likely not be engaged or interested in the material. In my field experience, I have seen students struggle with mitosis and meiosis initially, but they learned best when they were able to create diagrams and role-play as chromosomes during a kinesthetic activity. Engaging students by having them create things could potentially improve student learning in the diversity of life unit as well.

    Based on what I’ve learned thus far in the MAT program and seen in my field experience, I think engaging students by creating models and/or working in small groups would be really beneficial for difficult topics such as life diversity. I have personally found that a great way to test your knowledge about a topic is to try to teach someone else about that topic. Therefore, I could have students research a particular group of organisms and create their own timelines, tables, and Venn diagrams to present to the class. Memorizing a list of features that differentiate, for example, mammals from reptiles and amphibians, can be a daunting task, but having students take information they research, using the textbook and myself as a guide, and organize that information into a table or timeline can be a useful way for them to apply their knowledge to create something. For example, when learning about invertebrate species, I could assign a different phyla to each group of students. The groups would research their phylum, and present what they’ve learned to the class. They could use a Venn diagram comparing roundworms, flatworms, and annelids, or a timeline showing how the evolution of triploblasty and bilateral symmetry make sponges the simplest animals. Another useful component of this approach would involve having students generate their own questions and quiz each other on some of the important differences to be studied using flashcards. Having students take control of their own learning, and even participate in the creation of assessments, would combat the monotony and dullness that can accompany a unit that involves lots of fact memorization, such as diversity of life.