Clarifying the place of essential topics and unifying principles in high school biology

School Science and Mathematics, Jan 1998 by Chiappetta, Eugene L, Fillman, David A

In the late 1980s, the National Association for Biology Teachers' Teaching Standards Committee attempted to develop a set of recommendations for a minimal core curriculum for introductory high school biology courses. According to Leonard, Fowler, Mason, Ridenour, and Stone (1991), their survey showed that the biology educators desired to spend from approximately 6% to 25% of class time on the following areas:

Organism biology/human physiology

Genetics

Cell functioning

Ecology

Diversity Evolution

Scientific methodology

The biology educators indicated they should spend approximately 25% of classroom time on organism biology/human physiology, 15% on ecology, and 6% on scientific methodology. In addition, they desired to spend an average of 33% of the total teaching time in the laboratory or field.

Procedure

In order to gain greater insight into the problem of course content, the authors attempted to synthesize information from the literature, personal knowledge, and a survey of professionals. The survey was conducted using the Delphi technique (Linstone & Turf, 1975). This method is used to gather information from a group of individuals about a complex problem or issue. However, the individuals are not brought together. Instead, information was obtained from them through questionnaires, phone interviews, or personal interviews. An iterative process was used to clarify views and to arrive at consensus.

Seven science supervisors were asked to participate in this inquiry. They were administrators in seven different school districts in the Houston metropolitan area. All of them had taught high school biology. They had worked in science education for a mean of 19.57 years, taught biology for a mean of 11.14 years, and had been administrators for a mean of 12.42 years. Each supervisor agreed to participate in this investigation and was mailed a survey for Round 1 with the following instructions:

Consider a biology course for the majority of high school students, not a course for the most capable or mentally handicapped students. What ideas, thinking skills, laboratory skills, and attitudes should be developed in a biology course for the majority of high school students? In order to answer these questions, let's begin by identifying the essential ideas that students should learn in order to become biologically literate.

You can identify a core of essential biologyrelated ideas by selecting topics that should be included in a high school biology course. Attached is a list of biology topics to initiate your thinking (Appendix B). Identify only those topics that you consider essential, which students should study, not cover, during a high school biology course. Feel free to add topics to the list that you believe are essential. Then place a check (sq root) in the appropriate space to identify only those topics that should be studied in a high school biology course for the general student population.

In Round 2, the supervisors were asked to select one of the six statements that best represented their position and to support their choice by writing one or more paragraphs to explain the selection. In addition, the supervisors were asked why the topics they selected were so important and why they omitted other topics. The supervisors were given a seventh option, which was to create their own statement, one that best represented their belief regarding biology course content.