“You can’t memorize your way to an A in the class.”
“Biology isn’t the ‘easy science’ anymore.”
“The test scores dropped last year.”
“Only 5 percent of students got a 5.” (This is the highest possible score on Advanced Placement tests — standardized college-level exams for high school students.)
Such was the gossip circulating within my high school bubble about the redesigned AP biology class. We were the second class to take the new AP bio test; most of us only focused on our final grade and AP test score. The rationale behind the changes was peripheral. For all we cared, the College Board — the nonprofit organization that administers the AP exams, as well as the SAT — could just be trying to give us a hard time. In reality, College Board is trying to change the way students across the country learn biology, pushing classes to move from memorizing facts to understanding concepts and their applications.
In 2012, the College Board, along with a team of teachers and college professors, released a completely rewritten AP biology curriculum. The revamped curriculum emphasizes science literacy and inquiry. It centers around four “big ideas” or themes common throughout the field of biology:
- The process of evolution explains the diversity and unity of life.
- Biological systems utilize free energy and molecular building blocks to grow, to reproduce and to maintain dynamic homeostasis.
- Living systems store, retrieve, transmit and respond to information essential to life processes.
- Biological systems interact, and these systems and their interactions possess complex properties.
Rather than rote memorization of specific details or terms, the new changes prioritize understanding biological processes, placing information in context, and making predictions given the proper details. I originally interpreted this shift as an excuse for the College Board to cover less content and make the class “easier” while steepening the curve to compensate. However, biology is one of the fastest expanding fields of science, with the knowledge base increasing by roughly 10 percent every year. As a result, before the curriculum overhaul, textbooks were continually adding more information that had to be covered in the same amount of time, and nearly half of the students who took the AP exam failed.
The changes to the AP biology exam reflect a trend among the larger science community (scientists, teachers and policymakers) that calls for a shift from knowledge-based to inquiry-based learning. The goal is to make all students — and thus, the general public — more scientifically literate and to help them understand the need for science. It also aims to encourage careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) — fields that are considered important to future U.S. economic potential and technological innovation.
For example, the new AP biology curriculum requires that one quarter of class time be dedicated to inquiry-based laboratory experiments. This means replacing “Do plants grow better with water and sunlight?” experiments with opportunities to design our own investigations. Ideally, these types of labs are supposed to reinforce the notion that science is about questioning beyond the obvious, not just knowing a laundry list of biological processes. This shift is being implemented at all educational levels, from elementary schools to colleges. The AP courses are just one example.
I was unaware of most of these foundational changes while taking my AP biology class. I honestly was not concerned with teaching trends in STEM, the importance of science literacy or why we had weekly labs. I just wanted to get through the class. However, now that I have finished, I am beginning to realize the implications of the changes. Especially compared with my introductory 9th grade biology class, which involved memorizing note packets and diagrams, in my AP biology class I was able to focus more on the big ideas without getting caught up in terminology and details, most of which I would have forgotten after the test anyway. I found myself trying to learn the material as well as possible, instead of gauging success by a specific test score — a refreshing but sadly uncommon experience in high school AP classes.
With more than 200,000 students taking the AP biology test this year, the new curriculum redefines where the emphasis of science education should be placed. I learned more about the “why” rather than the “how,” and I increasingly began to see science as a dynamic rather than static subject. The other AP science classes are transitioning in this direction, too: A redesigned AP chemistry exam was administered this past April, and the former AP Physics B course will be split into two separate courses, AP Physics 1 and 2, this upcoming school year to give teachers more time to cover topics in depth.
As I enter my junior year of high school and prepare to take more AP science courses, I hope to be in classrooms that embrace inquiry-based learning and take these experiences to college and beyond, both in my career and in real life.
Amy Fan is a junior at Bellaire High School who worked as a summer 2014 intern for the Baker Institute’s Science and Technology Policy Program. She plans to major in a science or engineering field in college.