Article Critiques in Biology Class

And then there was the textbook. It was huge, and heavy...and intimidating. Just the size alone made my students' spines tight. So, one year I decided to "do away" with them. Not all together. I kept a classroom set. One under each desk. The parents and principal insisted that I assign each student a text book, so I complied; told the students to take it home and slide it under their beds.

I started supplementing current topics with classroom sets of pertinent articles from respected sources -- Psychology Today, Nature, National Geographic, The New York Times, etc. I tried to provide  several levels of reading difficulty and interests. I had classroom sets to cut down on paper. 

Here's how it worked:

Let's say that the current topic was enzymes. Five different articles with similar information in each article. The articles ranged in length from 500-1200 words, so not too lengthy. At the beginning of the year I handed each student what I thought would work. No choice unless an argument materialized. Then I let them work it out. (Pick your poison.) Later in the year, I let them select their own.

There was a silent period of reading, making notes, etc. Then each student was instructed to write a  summary from one-half to a full page. Time permitting, we swapped and read other students' summaries. It was best to read the summary of an article that the student had not read. Swapping may have lasted for 2-3 rounds.

Then the more difficult part was to write a "So What" paper. Length was from one-half to one page. Or less if it was mind-blowing. And the students had to justify WHY it was mind-blowing. Questions that they might answer included, "What's the Big Picture?" "What are the implications for your everyday life?" "Can you explain your findings to a six-year-old?" 

And of course, they had to site their sources from the article and file it in their portfolio notebooks for possible inclusion for end-of-the-grading-period projects.

What I discovered...

I saw a lot of regurgitation on the first page (a warm-up, I suppose) and then on the second page, I saw their creative sides; analyses of some relative complexity principles boiled down into their own words. And that, my friends, is what I was looking for. True, not every paper was worthy of framing, but for many, it was the first time they had ever looked a science article and so any progress was honored.