An AP Environmental Science FRQ for "The Martian"

Since I teach in New York, even though we're a private school, we have about three or four weeks of classes after the AP exam. We work on eco-columns during this time, but I don't need all of the class periods to work on this. We spend about half of the class time taking measurements from the eco-columns and then we've been watching The Martian during the second half of class. In the end, I think we'll take 4 days to finish the movie. I want this time in class to be low key, but not so low key that students completely check out. Instead of a long sheet of questions to fill out as students watch the movie, I decided to ask Gemini to make an FRQ using task verbs and topics from AP Environmental Science that corresponds to the Martian. This allows students more practice for FRQs since they still have a final exam to take for me, but is still not a huge assignment. 

I was happy with what Gemini gave me and appreciated the rubric that goes along with it. 

Here's a link to the Martian FRQ. The rubric comes right after the FRQ itself. 

AP Environmental Science LOs and EKs for all Units

 

So, I finally finished polishing up the documents for the last three units of AP Environmental Science. If you need any other information about what these include or what I use them for, you could check out this post. Here are the links for each unit:

Unit 1 "I can" statements

Unit 2 "I can" statements

Unit 3 "I can" statements

Unit 4 "I can" statements

Unit 5 "I can" statements

Unit 6 "I can" statements

Unit 7 "I can" statements

Unit 8 "I can" statements

Unit 9 "I can" statements

A New Way to Do Test Corrections for AP Environmental Science

Curves on Unit tests in AP classes is always a hot topic in the AP Facebook groups...at least the ones that I'm a part of. For the AP Unit tests that I give, I give the square root curve. Yes, I know it's a big curve, but I am determined to keep these AP classes accessible to any student who would like to take them, and this curve is part of what helps make that happen. The curve doesn't come for free though. Students must complete test corrections to "earn" the curve. I want to do whatever I can to help them actually learn this material. 

I used to have students explain why the right answer was the right answer for the multiple choice questions, but many students struggled with it and tended to just restate the question and answer or would write an incorrect explanation, which isn't helpful.  So now, for each question they get wrong, they write the essential knowledge statement that they feel goes with the question. (And this adds another use to the document I give them with all the LOs and EKs for the unit.) I have decided to expand that to them also using statements from their video notes and review book, so they don't write the same EK more than once. 

To help students narrow down which EK to use, I download the assessment that I've made on AP Classroom and then use adobe acrobat to add which topic each question is from. Students take the MCQ portion of their unit tests in the lockdown browser of AP Classroom, but when they do corrections (in my classroom), I give them the printed copy of MCQs to work with. 

Even though they take their test through AP Classroom, I have them also bubble their answers into a Zipgrade form. After the test, I print out their results from Zipgrade which includes their answers and what the correct answers are. This way, they know exactly which questions they need to do corrections on. They need this since I only allow access to their scores on AP Classroom, no question information. I print a few sets of MCQs, since only a few students come in to do corrections at a time, so there are typically enough copies to share. 

I have been liking this new way of doing test corrections far more than the old way, and at least students are writing true statements on their corrections!

AP Environmental Science LOs and EKs by Unit

In past years I had been using another AP Environmental teacher's documents that outlined the learning objectives and essential knowledge statements for each unit. I had some students who appreciated seeing the list of key concepts that they needed to know for the units as they prepared for tests. When I tried to use the first unit document at the end of the summer, I realized that the link was no longer active. I searched through the AP Environmental teachers Facebook group and found a spreadsheet with all of the information for every unit. I thought I might try to use ChatGPT to help me remake the documents by unit. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than I anticipated. By the beginning of the school year, I had rough drafts of each of the documents, but so far, only the first 6 units are finished as final documents. 

In these documents, the learning objectives have been converted into "I can" statements, organized by topics with essential knowledge statements below. At the end of the document there are tables that include the key enduring understandings and science practices for that unit. 

I've turned out to use the documents far more than I thought I would for this year's class. These documents are the first pages in the packet I hand out to students at the beginning of the unit. As we are reviewing for the unit test, I make note of some of the key essential knowledge statements based on the questions that will be on the test. Students highlight and make notes as well on their copies. I also started using the document for test corrections. This needs a blog post of its own though. 

One other note. I teach at a Christian school and last year, my scores for Biblical integration were not stellar. I was surprised, since for me I think of AP Environmental Science as a way to learn how God expects us to take care of the earth. To me, it's all Biblical. Part of my change to be more explicit this year, was to add a verse to these documents that I felt fit well with the topics of the units. Obviously, this will not work for all classes, but if you want to use these documents, feel free to edit after you make your copy of the document. 

Here are links to the documents that are final draft.

Unit 1 "I can" statements

Unit 2 "I can" statements

Unit 3 "I can" statements

Unit 4 "I can" statements

Unit 5 "I can" statements

Unit 6 "I can" statements

APES Sustainability Lab

Right after Thanksgiving Break, we're doing the Sustainability AP Lab AKA Tragedy of the Commons. 

Last year, we used Kristi Schertz's Happy Fishing Lab that you can find here. The only modification that I made was that our fishing poles were straws with paper clips to catch Fruit Loops instead of mini marshmallows. Well, that and we used way too many fish. I'll be using AP's suggested number of fish this time!

This year, we'll still start with the data tables from the Happy Fishing Lab, but it will be Part 1 of the AP Sustainability Lab. Then we'll move onto the actual AP lab for Part 2. I put together this Google Sheet to help students keep track of their data for part 2. I like to keep all of the class data together so students can see what other groups are doing. I also just add another tab each year by making a copy of the master tab. I have some Sheets from labs in AP Bio that have nearly 10 years of data!

The sheet is set up for four groups of four, but the groupings could always be copied and pasted for more groups, or even multiple tabs made. 

AP Environmental Science Cemetery Demographics

There is a wonderful, large, old cemetery less than a five minute drive from my school. This year I decided that we'd take a trip to the Albany Rural Cemetery to gather data for APES Lab #5. Because the cemetery is so close, I think we can gather lots of data during one of our 80 minute classes.

I want students to be able to focus on the graphs made and what they mean in terms of demographic transition and mortality rates. I started with Kristi Schertz's spreadsheet, and then converted it to work with College Board's math to go with the Cemetery Lab. This way, students just need to enter their raw data and the sheet will do the calculations for them. Then they can focus on what all of the numbers mean, and I don't need to give quite as much class time to calculations since we're taking an entire block class to collect the data.

We haven't used the sheet yet, so there may need to be some corrections made to formulas, but I wanted to share what I have just in case it would be helpful to another class that's about to do this lab. If you are wondering, the initials in cells B1 to L1 are my students' initials so they each know where to enter their data. If you'd like, you could add rows for each of your students, or assign lab groups to each column instead.

Here's the spreadsheet.

I also made a data collection sheet for students to bring to the cemetery. My thought was that each student would collect 25 dates from pre-1900 and 25 from post-1900, which gives us a total of 550 pieces of data. I made a dashed line in the middle-ish of the paper so they could aim to get about half female and half male data as well. 

Fillable Lab Sheets for AP Environmental Science Labs

Another one of my new classes for this year is AP Environmental Science.  Since we are a one to one device school, my goal is for students to complete as many lab analyses by Google Docs as possible. This saves lots of photocopies. A surprising bonus is that I am finding the labs faster to grade this way. Labs that are turned in through Google Classroom as google docs can be commented on. I can quickly type in a few comments to students' lab and count comments to determine the grade. 

One other I like about making fillable labs in Google docs is using 1-cell tables for the answers. Otherwise I find myself searching for answers that blend in with questions.

The labs themselves with teacher editions and student editions with procedures can be found in AP Classroom for Environmental Science if you are an approved teacher. 

I'll add links to the three labs that I've made fillable answer sheets for. If I could find a fillable lab sheet that someone else had done, I used them and didn't reinvent the wheel.

AP Lab #1: Primary Productivity

AP Lab #2: Species Diversity

AP Lab #7: Physical and Chemical Properties of Soil