Essential Knowledge Student Reflections

Going with my theme this year of reflection and revision, I have had my students regularly reflect on the Essential Knowledge statements from the AP Biology framework. Last year, I organized the Essential Knowledge statements (along with the Enduring Understandings and Learning Objectives) by each unit and provided them to my students as study guides. I blogged about it last year here.

By the end of the year, I could tell that students weren't utilizing them as much as I had hoped. I want students to grapple with these statements, get familiar with the wording, and be able to connect what we are doing in class to these statements. First change: I made time in class for this reflecting to be done.

I also wanted students to have all of these reflections in one place to review them when they study for a test and to be able to look back as the year progresses to see their own growth from beginning to end. My goal was to automate as much of this process as possible. I already use a Google Form and Autocrat to grade labs and give students rich feedback in an easy-to-read document. I love the automation of this and blogged about it last school year here.

But the issue with reflections is that I want my students to have several reflections per unit. Each time they make a reflection with the Google Form, they create another row. So, I needed to be able to merge all of the separate rows of reflections from one student into one row. Enter an additional sheet Add-On called "Power Tools"! This add-on performs several functions, but the one I was interested in combines rows. I tell it what cell to look for identical entries (last name), and it merges all of the rows by one student into one row. This usually takes me two tries, because inevitably a couple of students will type an extra space after their names sometimes, but not all of the times. Power tools recognizes this space and doesn't consider the name identical.

I made a video of me making these documents for my students after they had done their reflections in Forms--just in case it makes more sense than the directions.

• Create response spreadsheet from the Google Form.
• In the newly formed spreadsheet, go to add-ons and get the add-on "Power Tools"
• Once it's added, go to the add-on menu, Power Tools, and click start.

• Select "Data" and then "Combine Rows."
• I then let it auto-select the data (which is all of it).
• Choose "last name" for the key column with duplicate records.
• For choosing columns to merge, I choose all of the columns, the action is "merge values," and the delimiter is "comma."
• Click "finish" and it merges the rows. 
• Then sort the sheet alphabetically by last name, which makes it easier for me to figure out who added that extra space after their last name.
• I remove the extra space and go through the combine rows process for a final time. (Which takes about 20 seconds.)
• Close power tools and launch the add-on "AutoCrat" so I can make a document for each student of their responses. 
• Give the job a name and click next.
• Select a template (I make these ahead of time and will give links to them.) It'll show what rows will be merged into which part of the google doc. Since I've put these together I know that everything will match up the way it needs to. This did take some tweaking at first for me.
• Chose how the documents will be named. I do <<First>> <<Last>> Unit # Reflections
• It'll suggest a folder to put the merged documents into. You may select a different one if you'd like.
• I skip the optional items and don't share the results by email, although if I had a lot of students I might.
• Save and then when the Job pops up, hit the triangle play button.
• Once all of the documents are merged, I go to the folder they were put in and print them out for my students to reference as they prepare for their upcoming unit test.

This sounds time consuming, and it did take me awhile to figure it all out. But now that I've done it several times, I can have it completed in about 10 minutes or less.

Here are the Google Forms and Templates for each unit.

Unit 1 Biochemistry                     Biochemistry Template
Unit 2 Cells                                  Cells Template
Unit 3 Cellular Energetics           Cellular Energetics Template
Unit 4 & 5 The Cell Cycle           The Cell Cycle Template
Unit 6 Molecular Genetics           Molecular Genetics Template
Unit 7 Evolution                           Evolution Template
Unit 8 Plants (this unit is so small, I skipped the reflections)
Unit 9 Ecology                              Ecology Template
Unit 10 Humans                            Human Form and Function Template

First Day Plans for AP Bio

Although for the last two years I had been starting AP Bio with a lemonade lab (after brief introductions), I decided we needed a change this year. I loved the practice with experimental design students got, but the lab itself didn’t add anything to the content of the class. Through the AP Biology Facebook community, I saw a water lab that helped introduce statistics. They'll perform several trials to determine the number of drops of water, water with soap, or rubbing alcohol that will stay on a penny without spilling over.  Not only does this lab give statistics practice, but also fits with the current content--biochemistry. Over the summer, students read the water chapter and this lab allows some review of this material.

I won't include the lab document since it isn’t mine to share, but I did make a google sheet to accompany it. This is the link to the google sheet I made for students to put their data. I put all of the formulas in for them this time, since I wanted to focus on the stats themselves. I also combined their data to get sample sizes large enough for +/- 2SEM to work for the 95% confidence interval. We’ll do one more lab activity where I give the formulas before I task them with an inquiry lab and they have to do the stats on their own.

I do start the class with quick introductions to me and to the class itself. This year the introduction will come through a Kahoot! I also have students fill out a google form to help me get to know them better. Then we jump into our lab. I'm also using a new way to split kids into lab partners. In the past I have let them choose partners, but it doesn't always work well. This time they'll pick a card and figure out their lab group and lab table. The colored cards will each be on a different table. It'll also be a quick check of how their summer learning went.

Maximizing Lab Report Feedback While Minimizing Grading Time

Over the summer a blog post caught my eye because it mentioned giving feedback to students without taking hours.  I loved this idea, since grading AP Biology formal lab reports takes forever. The post in Mrs. Brosseau's Binder reminded me that often I am writing the same comments on students' labs. I put together a Google form, trying to remember the most common comments I give when grading labs. I added all of the possible comments in the form and then also added the option "other" which allows me to type in whatever comments I might want to add that are not already on the list.

Here is the link to my Lab Grading Google Form.

I needed a way to take the information from the form that goes into a spreadsheet to give individual feedback to students.  One way to do that would be with the form add-on docAppender.  For my classes though, I found that the add-on autoCrat in Sheets worked best for me.  I needed to make a template for my feedback to go in, and then autoCrat makes a document for each student whose lab I grade. It took me a little while to figure out how I wanted the template to look and to get all of the tabs in to map the information from the Sheet into the template. Now when I grade lab reports, I can give my students rich feedback in a nicely formatted document. Then I just drag the newly made documents into the Google Drive folders that I share with my students. I love it!

Here's the link to the Lab Grade Template that autoCrat merges for me.

Grading labs comes down to these steps:

1. Create a Google Form to use when grading labs (or use mine).
   
2. Grade labs by clicking the comment choices in the form, or adding other comments as needed in the "other" option in the form.
   
3. Once you have graded the labs, go to the Sheet that is created from the form responses.
   
4. Make sure to install the autoCrat add-on from the add-ons menu.
   
   
   
   
5. Start up autoCrat and answer the questions it asks--such as which template to use for the merge.  You can already have one that you've made or use mine. 
   
   
6. After answering questions, start the merge, and viola! you have documents of feedback for each of your students.
   

One other explanation of my form.  I grade each section of my students' labs with a rubric using a score range of 1 to 4, but each section of the lab gets weighted differently.  In the end, it all adds up to 100 points.  I add the formula to calculate that in sheets so I don't have to.  Here is the rubric I use for grading labs.

First Day of School Plans

For my AP Biology class, the students already know each other, I just don't know them.  We don't need any sort of mixer, so we get right to work.  I want them to get practice designing an experiment and get them comfortable with using google sheets. We use google sheets for nearly all our labs, because it allows for instant sharing of everyone's data.  

Since I want to focus on learning how to set up a lab and use sheets, I present them with a simple question to investigate.  We delve into the heavy AP labs soon enough.  I got this simple idea from a lab from Cooking with Science on Teachers Pay Teachers and combined it with an exercise from Biology Inquiries: Standards-Based Labs, Assessments, and Discussion Lessons by Martin Shields. The question to investigate is, "Do you get more juice out of lemons if you heat them first?" After designing the experiment and collecting data, they work on finding the standard deviation and graph the data including 2 Standard Error of the Mean. We could also add in a chi-square analysis, but I think they have enough on their plates already.

For the Living Environment class, we use stations as a get to know your classmates, get set up for class, and practice some lab techniques. The inspiration for this activity was from Amy Brown Science and her Science Chat. My students get their textbook, set up their notebook, adjust their goggles and lab aprons, and pick their preferred size of gloves. They also practice reading the meniscus in a graduated cylinder, using a ruler, using pH paper, and calibrating our digital scales. To try to save paper, I give them an answer sheet to fill in as they go that is a half sheet (but is quite tight on space). Here is a link to the stations I use and the link to the answer sheets for the students to use and keep track of what stations they still need to go to.