Biology

Course Overview

The high school Performance Expectations (PEs) in the life sciences address essential questions about life and build on middle school ideas and experiences.  They blend Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) with Scientific and Engineering Practices (SEP) and Crosscutting Concepts (CCC) to support students in developing usable knowledge to explain real-world phenomena in the life sciences.  In Biology, students regularly engage in asking scientific questions that drive their investigations and lead to increasingly sophisticated evaluation of data and their presentation.  Students also have opportunities to learn and apply engineering-specific practices such as designing solutions to identified problems. Read the full NGSS storyline (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. for Life Science.

Through the Howard County Watershed Report Card programLinks to an external site., students will be able to collect and analyze data on the Howard County Watershed in their schoolyard and at a local stream.  Students will research how to improve the health of the watershed.  Finally, students will demonstrate their knowledge of the watershed by presenting their information collected and proposing a possible action plan to improve the health of the Howard County Watershed. 

The driving questions for the Biology course are:

1. How and why do organisms interact with their environment, and what are the effects of these interactions? 
2. How do living things use food as a source of matter for building and repairing body structures (while training for an athletic competition) and a source of energy for growth and motion (during the competitive event)?
3. How can we understand and diagnose genetic diseases?
4. Why don’t antibiotics work like they used to? What evidence shows that different species are related?

The learning sequence in Biology is organized around a series of driving questions that provide the context and motivation for learning.  While exploring each driving question, students engage in unique learning experiences that are carefully designed to immerse them in the SEPs as they construct their understanding of important concepts. These experiences are carefully sequenced so that students encounter ideas that are developmentally and cognitively appropriate.  By the end of the learning experiences,  students will be able to meet the NGSS performance expectations and address the driving questions.

Unit OVERVIEW

Students will be able to independently use their learning to formulate answers to the questions, “How does human activity impact the environment and biodiversity of an ecosystem? Should the tuna fishery in Avril Gulf be reopened?”  After gaining an understanding of population dynamics and relationships within an ecosystem, students examine several fishery management options that have been implemented during fishery crises in other regions and argue which should be implemented in response to declining fish catches and the depletion of the Avril Gulf ecosystem.  High school students use mathematical reasoning to demonstrate understanding of fundamental concepts of carrying capacity, factors affecting biodiversity and populations, and the cycling of matter and flow of energy among organisms in an ecosystem. These mathematical models provide support of students’ conceptual understanding of systems and their ability to develop design solutions for reducing the impact of human activities on the environment and maintaining biodiversity. Crosscutting concepts of systems and system models play a central role in students’ understanding of science and engineering practices and core ideas of ecosystems.

Unit OVERVIEW

Students will be able to independently use their learning to formulate an answer to the question, “How do living things use food as a source of matter for building and repairing body structures (while training for an athletic competition) and a source of energy for growth and motion (during the competitive event)?" To build body structures for growth and repair, living organisms produce polymers (and water molecules) during energy requiring chemical reactions between monomers. The energy both plants and animals use to produce polymers comes indirectly from energy releasing chemical reactions such as the oxidation of glucose, fatty acid, and amino acid monomers and directly from the hydrolysis of ATP to form ADP and inorganic phosphate. The same energy releasing chemical reactions provide energy for motion. While much of the energy released can be used for growth and motion, a lot of the energy is transferred as heat to the surroundings. Animals obtain monomers from their food, whereas plants make monomers from inorganic substances during energy requiring chemical reactions that use energy from the sun. During both energy releasing and energy requiring chemical reactions, atoms are rearranged and conserved; therefore, total mass is conserved. The net amount of energy released or required reflects the difference between the total amount of energy that must be added to break bonds between atoms of reactant molecules and the total amount of energy that is released when bonds form between atoms of product molecules. As with atoms, energy is neither created nor destroyed during chemical reactions. In these performance expectations, students demonstrate that they can use investigations and gather evidence to support explanations of chemical reactions. They understand the role of proteins as essential to the work of the cell and living systems. Students use models to explain cellular respiration, photosynthesis, and the cycling of matter and flow of energy in living organisms. The cellular processes can be used as a model for understanding of the hierarchical organization of organism. Crosscutting concepts of matter and energy, structure and function, and systems and system models provide students with insights to the structures and processes of organisms.

Unit OVERVIEW

Students will be able to independently use their learning to formulate an answer to the questions,formulate an answer to the question, “How can we understand and diagnose genetic diseases?” Students will propose a model for how a particular genetic disorder originated when presented with three different patient case studies by using their knowledge of mitosis, meiosis, DNA replication and protein synthesis.  Students will diagnose a patient’s mystery illness by constructing pedigrees, Punnett squares, karyotypes, and using their knowledge of DNA, transcription and translation and the results from gel electrophoresis.  Throughout this unit, students ask questions, conduct investigations, make and defend claims, and use concepts of probability to explain the mechanisms of genetic inheritance and describe the environmental and genetic causes of gene mutation and the alteration of gene expression which can sometimes result in disease.

Unit OVERVIEW

Students will be able to independently use their learning to formulate an answer to the questions, “Why don’t antibiotics work like they used to?”  and “What evidence shows that different species are related?” Students construct an explanation for the process of natural selection based on simulations showing how drug resistant bacteria increase in number when antibiotics aren’t taken as prescribed or are overprescribed. The students will develop models on the evolution of bacteria to complete their mission as citizen scientists developing more effective infographics to sway individual health choices related to the misuse of antibiotics. In the first part of this unit, students investigate the case of a young girl with a life-threatening infection of pan-resistant bacteria.  In second part of this unit, students investigate the case of a population of urban Juncos that has recently settled on the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) campus. Students can apply concepts of probability to explain trends in populations as those trends relate to advantageous heritable traits in a specific environment.  Additionally, students evaluate evidence of the conditions that may result in new species and understand the role of genetic variation in natural selection.  Students construct an explanation for evolution and communicate how multiple lines of evidence support these explanations. The crosscutting concepts of cause and effect and systems and system models play an important role in students’ understanding of the evolution of life on Earth.

 (Links to an external site.) This research-based unit is from NextGenStorylines.org (Links to an external site.) and has been developed by Northwestern University and the University of Colorado Boulder. On February 26, 2019, this unit was awarded the NGSS Design Badge (Links to an external site.) as an Example of High Quality NGSS Design.