Toward High School Biology: Helping Middle School Students and Teachers Make Sense of Chemical Reactions

  • Create, implement, and study a curriculum unit focused on key ideas in chemistry and their application to living systems, in order to prepare middle school students for high school biology
  • Use research in students’ thinking and instructional approaches to target learning about chemical reactions in living and nonliving contexts
  • Study the effectiveness of the units in Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
  • Project Partner: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Project 2061

Toward High School Biology: Helping Middle School Students Make Sense of Chemical Reactions is a three-year partnership with AAAS Project 2061. The outcomes of the project include 1) developing and evaluating a 5-6 week unit for teaching middle school students about key ideas in chemistry and the application of those ideas to living systems and 2) developing accompanying teacher materials and professional development (PD) to support them in teaching the unit.

The unit will help students and teachers develop an “atom rearrangement and conservation” conceptual model of chemical reactions in both non-living and living contexts. We will develop and use measures to collect and analyze data on curriculum quality, classroom feasibility, and student understanding.

Toward High School Biology will enrich the research base concerning students’ thinking about chemical reactions in non-living and living contexts, while creating instruction that addresses their learning to explain natural phenomena using physical and pictorial molecular models. Research indicates that students have difficulty understanding chemical reactions at an atomic/molecular level, and thus struggle with high school biology content that depends upon chemistry.

The unit will help students relate chemical reactions they observe in the classroom to those that are essential for growth and repair in plants and animals. By bringing together concepts from chemistry with contexts of growth in living things, the new units will illustrate a coherent story of chemical reactions as they occur in nonliving and living contexts.

For more information, contact BSCS Science Educator Rebecca Kruse.