Tag Archives: biology

School News Network: The Biology Chronicles

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Jennifer Romero and Shontaeja Miller examine an agar plate for bacterial colonies. (School News Network.)

By Bridie Bereza
School News Network


Step into Godwin Heights High School biology teacher Cory Klocko’s classroom on any given day, and you’re bound to see few eyes on the teacher. Rather, you’ll see students discussing, hypothesizing and testing their theories to answer questions such as “Why is Addie sick?”

Addie is a character in one of three narratives provided by the Next Generation Science Standards storyline curriculum embraced this year by Klocko and his colleague, biology teacher Derek Stoneman.

Memorizing facts is one thing, but understanding concepts is quite another. Thanks to the three storylines, which cover an entire year of biology curriculum, students are ditching the flashcards and homework and finding that biology is pretty cool when it revolves around telling stories.

As one storyline goes, Addie gets sicker over time and antibiotics aren’t helping. Students have to figure out why, and the solution requires learning about bacterial evolution, growing bacteria on an agar plate and understanding antibiotic resistance, among other things.

Kierra Strickland explains a design for a hypothetical experiment. (School News Network.)

Less Memorization, More Assimilation

The new curriculum is unlike anything Madison Hall, a 10th-grader in Klocko’s Biology class, has ever seen.

“The teachers let the students find the answers as a class without telling them the answer directly, and help steer the students in the right direction to understand the material,” Madison explained.

While there’s not much to memorize and homework is rare, “every day is hard,” Klocko said. Attendance is crucial, because the learning takes place inside the discussion.

“The rigor of it is unlike anything I’ve seen or taught with science in the past,” Stoneman said.

Klocko said students were a little confused at first by the shift in thinking: “You’re not going to tell us the answers?” they’d say. But they caught on quickly, he said, and are learning the value in struggling.

They also understand and remember the material after the unit is over because each storyline “lets the students think more about what they are learning and helps the students to understand the answers… instead of just memorizing the answers,” Madison said.

Case in point: after the bell rang following the very first class Stoneman taught using storylines, he said, students were still discussing Addie.

Wendi Vogel, Kent ISD science consultant, said Godwin Heights and Union High School are two Kent County schools using the biology curriculum this year. Michigan adopted NGSS for the state in 2015, and the life science storylines are beginning to take hold here. Vogel said there were two curriculum writers and reviewers in Michigan already, and she tapped them to launch the biology program in Kent County.

Klocko and Stoneman attended a training on this curriculum last year and and decided last summer that they would follow it for the 2018-1019 school year. The NGSS storylines are a fairly radical departure from the way they used to teach — standing in front of the class, delivering lesson plans.

“It’s really refreshing. Instead of me thinking, ‘What am I going to teach these kids?’ it’s ‘what are these kids going to find out on their own?’” Klocko said. “It’s the best resource there is out there to teach science, in my opinion.”

Seeing students understand and embrace the curriculum has been rewarding for the teachers. The success of it, Klocko said, is partly due to having a collaborator in Stoneman. They meet each morning to discuss their successes and failures with the curriculum. There are no textbooks; all the material is online and readings are embedded into the problems.

Storylines and Bloodlines

“Biology this year is much more fun and enjoyable than the previous years of science,” said Skyler Lambright, a freshman in Klocko’s class.

Skyler particularly enjoyed a recent unit, which used a storyline about Duchenne muscular dystrophy to teach about genetics and inherited conditions. Students learned about the x-linked recessive disorder, and asked, “Why does this mostly affect boys?”

Students can explain the “why” fluently by the time the unit is finished, Stoneman said.

“The kids are figuring it out as they go. It’s not  ‘All right, today, I’m going to tell you what natural selection is.’ It’s putting the pieces together through reading, writing and discussion and figuring out what’s happening and why. “They’re going to put together a coherent thought instead of regurgitating what I told them.”

Need evidence that students are engaged?

Klocko said he received an email from a student who had been thinking about a problem they were working on in class — at 8:30 p.m. on a Friday.

For more stories on local schools, visit the School News Network website, schoolnewsnetwork.org.

Measuring Plaster Creek’s progress in microbes

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Photo by Amanda Impens

By Connor Bechler, Calvin College

 

E. Coli, a largely harmless but occasionally dangerous bacteria present in animal and human feces, is found throughout the Plaster Creek watershed. The E. Coli strains present in the watershed from animal waste are likely the product of agricultural runoff. However, when it comes to the E. Coli from human waste, according to professor Kelly DuBois, “it’s really not known where that’s coming from.”

 

So, does DuBois, a professor of biology, intend to track down the source? “Based on how often they’re finding [E. Coli]—all over the place—it can’t be one source, so we have a really small chance of pinpointing all the sources and shutting them all down,” said DuBois.

 

Instead, she is working with a group of student researchers to assess if green infrastructure installations could be an environmentally safe solution. In particular, they are looking at the impact of Kreiser pond, a retention basin installed in a residential area of Grand Rapids four or five years ago, “which is essentially a U-shaped little pond,” built to slow rainwater runoff. “We know it slows the flow down, it absolutely works for that,” said DuBois, “but my question was: what is it doing with the microbes in the water?”

A collaborative legacy

While according to DuBois, “it’s been shown in some instances that green infrastructure can be really efficient at removing bacterial contamination,” she hopes to prove that it’s effective in Plaster Creek’s case so that future green infrastructure projects in the watershed can be designed with microbial reduction in mind.

 

The project is in collaboration with the Plaster Creek Stewards, a group of Calvin faculty, staff, and students who have been working over a decade on the restoration of the Plaster Creek watershed. “It’s a fun group to be a  part of,” said DuBois, “because there’s so much collaboration, and everyone comes at it from a little different perspective.”

 

DuBois was inspired to work with Plaster Creek Stewards after doing research through Calvin’s Clean Water Institute last year. “I was really excited to be a part of [the Clean Water Institute], and that has kind of led to [working with Plaster Creek],” she said, “because I developed that skill set last summer with my student, it was like ‘hey, we can apply these [tools] to Plaster Creek too!”

Pursuing proper stewardship

“As biologists, obviously, creation care is something that’s very important to us,” DuBois said, “I honestly love bench science, but it’s nice to have a project [where] it’s easier for students to see the direct connection with taking care of creation.” She added, “we can see, when we measure stuff in that water, that humans have had a negative impact on this little part of creation, and so it’s very practical to say we want to turn that around now.”

 

One of the student researchers, Kate DeHeer, a junior majoring in biology and biochemistry, has observed firsthand the positive community impacts of the Steward’s work: “we’ve only been out to the pond twice, but have met around five neighbors interested in our work.” She added, “they all seem to be fond of Kreiser and were happy to have it in their neighborhood.”

 

According to Tobe Ndika, a junior biology major with a pre-med concentration, “[this research] has made me aware of the need for stewardship towards God’s creation.” He added “I feel called to make the world a better place.”

 

Reprinted with permission from Calvin College.

Finding answers and building network for rare disease community

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Photo Credit: Lindsay Laurie

By Connor Bechler, Calvin College

 

How can mutations in one supposedly single-function protein result in four unique diseases with symptoms ranging from strangely textured hair to early death?

 

That’s the question that biochemistry professor Rachael Baker and biology professor Amy Wilstermann are seeking to answer through three linked research projects this summer. Working with three student researchers to conduct experiments on the mitochondria of yeast and zebrafish, the professors are examining the effects of mutations in the protein’s gene to determine its other roles within the cell.

 

By discovering how each mutation results in each disease, Baker says they hope to more fully understand the mitochondrial system, leading to both “better treatments for people affected by rare diseases and a better understanding about health and wellness in general that could lead to treatments for things like cancer and other disorders.”

Beyond the lab

Baker and Wilstermann, however, view these direct applications as only one step in the larger process of improving the lives of those with rare diseases.

 

“There’s just a lot of uncertainty [around rare disease]; even when you get a diagnosis, you might not know what the prognosis is,” said Wilstermann. She and Baker aim to help remedy this through two key routes: improving the readability of scholarly work on rare disease and providing a website to collect information for patients and their families.

 

During the summer, Wilstermann says, the students will work toward both goals by reviewing the literature around a specific rare disease and writing a condensed summary for the website, giving them practice in “taking really complicated ideas and mak[ing] them accessible but still completely accurate.” Wilstermann says that the students will most likely start by covering the diseases which were represented at the rare disease symposium (in March 2018) and are present in the local community.

 

The website is broadly intended to function as a network for members of the rare disease community, including patients, families, clinicians, and researchers. “We want it to be a place where we can connect people with resources; we want it to be a place where people can connect with one another,” Wilstermann said. “There’s opportunity to bring people together and help build a supportive community around common experiences, and the common experience of being rare.”

A faith-driven approach

“This project, for me, encapsulates why I came to be a professor at Calvin college,” said Baker. “The way we do science looks different here,” she added. “We eat together each week, we value each other, and we [work] in a body of Christ model where different people have different strengths and interests [which we] bring together to be a functioning whole. We’ve employed various practices that are really rooted in Christian principles, and we’ve used those to shape how we run our research team.

 

“To me,” Baker said, “it’s really exciting that I get to do that and think about it explicitly.”

 

Reprinted with permission from Calvin College.

School News Network: Student Talent plus Technology Tackle Pollution Problem

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Freshman Will Chatlosh shows his map detailing water runoff, a non point source of pollution.

By Erin Albanese

School News Network

 

A drone buzzed over the East Kentwood Freshman campus, snapping photos to document the path of water runoff from the school building to a Buck Creek tributary that runs across the property. While watching the miniature aircraft, science students talked about how to reduce humans’ impact on the environment. They would later use technology to create maps and documentaries.

 

Welcome to 21st-century biology, where students have tools like drones for snapping photos from a bird’s eye view, 3-D printers for creating three-dimensional models and smartphones to create video.

 

Students gather to fly the drone in the schoolyard.

In science teacher Nicholas Bihler’s class, they also had the drive to tackle a real-world problem: Water that comes off the school roof simply drains onto the ground, collecting sediment and chemicals and polluting nearby waterways.

 

“Unfortunately, that’s a major source of nonpoint-source pollution,” Bihler said.

 

While solutions to fix the runoff problem are still unfolding, students completed several projects connected to nonpoint source pollution, and the ramifications it has on the community and local watershed. They recently showcased their work – models of campus that show the runoff path, reports, informational posters and videos – after several weeks exploring the issue and building awareness.

 

“Our whole purpose is to educate the community on how water runoff affects the community and the environment as a whole,” said freshman Emily Kwekel.

 

Students created projects with technology including drone pictures of campus and 3-D printed items.

Ongoing Work

Students’ projects and data will be used by next year’s class, and could eventually be part of a local information campaign to spur efforts to reduce pollution in the watershed. Research included gathering and testing water from the creek to create an analysis of the stream’s health. Results showed excessive phosphorus levels. Insects lacked diversity, indicating poor water quality, and next year’s students will use the data as a baseline.

 

“I want my students to be able to educate others about nonpoint source pollution and meaningful ways citizens can take action to reduce it,” Bihler said.

 

Students said they learned that pollution can come from everyday things: Fertilizers and cars have a far-reaching effect.

 

“It hurts the animals and then those animals can’t eat because their food source is dying off, and then they die and go extinct and people wonder why,” said freshman Lilli Crowley.

 

A water-mitigation garden, created by staff, is just one step in reducing the problem of water runoff from the school.

Taking action at a staff level, Bihler and his colleagues, teachers Adrienne DeMilner, Alan Freudigmann and Beth Thompson, partnered with Groundswell, an initiative through Grand Valley State University, in creating a rain mitigation garden in the school to capture water runoff and hold it in the soil with native plants.

 

As for sharing the message, freshman Will Chatlosh’s report, presented to his class and earning loud applause from peers, gets to the point.

 

“Human activities such as deforestation, agricultural advancements, and increased urbanization are all factors that increase pollution in this way,” he said, while reading his report to the class. “However, it may be a lack of information that kills millions of animals a year and increases the chance of disease around the world. However, more specifically our community is also affected by nonpoint source pollution.”

 

He said becoming informed is key. “Nonpoint source pollution could destroy the world but it doesn’t have to.”

 


Students debate what do do about non-point source pollution during a Socratic Smackdown.