How Well Does High School Biology Prepare Students for College?

[Marta Toran]

Hi Everyone,

 

I'm on the final stage of data collection for my Master's project. My study focuses on the transition between high school and college biology courses, in terms of content knowledge transfer. I have had around 2000 students participate in the student section, and now looking for high school and college bio teachers.

 

If you teach or have taught Biology 1/ Intro Biology in high school, would you please consider taking this very quick survey? I also need some people to interview over the phone, let me know if interested :)

http://tinyurl.com/bioteacherquestionnaire

 

If you teach an introductory level biology course at a university, here is the link to the professor survey.

http://tinyurl.com/bioprofessorquestionnaire

 

Thank you to everyone in advance for checking it out, please feel free to forward the link to colleagues who are in either category.

 

All the best for 2011!

 

Marta Toran

 

 

[Marta Toran]

Please feel free to also add your thoughts here if you wish to see everyone else's and have an open discussion about the topic. But don't forget to submit the survey, it's only 5 questions, and it would be a huge help for my research project. Thanks for your time.

[Cheryl Hollinger]

Marta,

What if you don't fit in either category? I teach AP Biology.

[Marta Toran]

Hi Cheryl,

Thanks for your reply. My research project focuses specifically on Biology 1/ Introductory Biology courses in high school because it is assumed that the main purpose of AP Biology is to prepare students for college courses. I am trying to determine how good regular biology courses in high school are in preparing the students for these entry level biology courses in college, and how much of a priority this is for high school biology teachers. I do however have student data for AP Biology too (ie. from the college students who took the survey, there is a percentage that took AP Biology in high school), so I can include some sort of comparison too.

For the survey itself, I need Biology 1 teachers  (teaching it now or have taught it in the past). But I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter of preparing high school students for college biology, and I can certainly include perspectives of AP Biology teachers too. So please feel free to add your comments below.

Thanks for asking :)