Practicing FRQs in AP Bio In Person and Virtually

Since I returned to the classroom five years ago, I've been having my AP Bio students practice released Free Response Questions from past exams. In the last two years, I've been coupling that with having them grade not only their own responses with the scoring guide, but scoring the student examples that the College Board provides. My students have said that they find this exercise helpful, so I continued this practice even when we were online. 

Doing this online posed a few challenges. I didn't want to have to post a bunch of documents (questions, rubric, and student samples) and I didn't want students to see what the actual scores of the samples were. The longer I was teaching from home, the more ways I figured out how to solve these problems.  

One way was to print out the pages I wanted and then used the Image Capture app in my school MacBook to scan all of the documents on my wireless printer/scanner into one PDF. I didn't even know I had this app until I found it by accident in desperation while online teaching. My daughter, who was zooming for college, was delighted that I found this. She regularly had to scan documents and upload them for her classes.  One benefit of this method is that I could mark out the letters that the College Board had put at the top of the student sample FRQs and put my own letters on them. This is handy because my students quickly figure out that the A example is the best score, B is in the middle, and C is the worst. This method allowed me to just provide students with the original FRQ, the scoring guide, and the three student samples. When they were finished I would then reveal what the actual scores of the student samples were. (Which is what I usually do in the classroom.)

I wasn't keen on printing out that many pages...especially since I knew printouts were sitting at school. The second way I figured out how to take pages from several documents and put them into one was using Notability. I put all of the separate documents into one document in Notability, eliminated the pages I didn't want, and changed the order of the student sample pages. I could also mark out the original letters marking the student samples and add my own. 

To keep all students participating even if they are reluctant to share in class or on Zoom, I put together this Google Form for them to report their results in. In the classroom, I'm able to walk around and check on the progress of each student. This was much harder online. And both online and in class there are always students more reluctant to share. Filling out the form allows all students to contribute without putting any of them on the spot.

Here are the FRQs that I've done so far. They are primarily from ecology and human body systems since those are the last two units of the year. I only changed the order and letters of the first question linked here, since this Spring I was working in survival mode and was just trying to get the documents workable.

Human Body Systems

2015 Question 8

2015 Question 7

2013 Question 7

2014 Question 6

2016 Question 8

2018 Question 8

2019 Question 4

Ecology

2013 Question 1

2014 Question 3

2014 Question 7

2017 Question 4

March Mammal Madness

Through different science teacher groups in Facebook, I was introduced to March Mammal Madness. Last year was the first time that I participated with my Honors Biology class. In preparation I used painters tape on the wall outside my classroom to mark out the bracket. Then I put together a Google Slides document formatted the way I wanted it to be for students to fill in information about each of the competitors to put on the wall bracket. We split the animals evenly among all of the students and they worked on filling out the information for their assigned animals. Students also used the Slides presentation to make more informed decisions as they were filling out their own brackets. We allowed any student in the school who wanted to compete to fill out a bracket and follow along. As the competitions happened, I moved the winners forward on the brackets so everyone could see the progress. 

Student-made information sheets for two of the 2020 competitors.

Students finished filling out their brackets before the actual competitions began and were ready to go once the battles ensued. The day after each battle happened on twitter, we would watch the rodent recap done by Rodent Roudtable on YouTube in class. Even my high schoolers enjoyed the cheesy recaps of the competitions.  At the end, I gave the student with the highest score on their bracket a little trophy that I had bought off of Amazon.

Sample information sheets from 2019

This year, we went to online learning shortly after the competitions began. Students appreciated that even if everything else was cancelled, at least March Mammal Madness was still happening and we could still watch the recaps together as a class.

If you'd like to participate in MMM, Arizona State University's site here is the place to get started. Here is the link to the Google Slide that I put together for students to use to put the animal information in.