AP Bio FRQ Reader Panel
Note: This was designed for teachers to assist their students on their FRQ writing. I am just cutting out the middle person to provide you the info.
This was brought to you by Glenn Wolkenfeld from ScienceMusicVideos (www.youtube.com/user/sciencemusicvideos)
This was brought to you by Glenn Wolkenfeld from ScienceMusicVideos (www.youtube.com/user/sciencemusicvideos)
Notes from Presentation
- Jason Cox
- Make sure your students carefully read the question. Make sure that your students, rather than just showing what they know, ensure that they’re answering the question. Jason has his students box the command terms and circle the qualifiers.
- Common mistakes: Explaining rather than justifying. Listing instead of providing evidence
- Restating the question is NOT required. Doing so can lead students to think they’ve responded to the prompt, when they haven’t.
- Allison Kittay
- Teach your students the acronym ATP: ANSWER THE PROMPT
- Students should use a close reading strategy:
- Put a box around the task verbs
- Circle instructions that tell you how many (for example, how many examples you should list in response to a question).
- Underline any content words. This can jog a students’ memory, and direct them to the content they should be discussing in their response.
- Example task verb:
- State the null hypothesis (no difference caused by the independent variable used in the experiment).
- State the alternative hypothesis (describes an effect the independent variable has upon the dependent variable).
- Kelley Derrick
- Have students make sure they’re writing a college level response (as opposed to a high school level response).
- Example: don’t use general terms like altered. Questions are looking for directionality: increase or decrease.
- Example: don’t say the organism will suffer. It’s not specific enough
- Example: don’t say mutation, when the type of mutation might be what’s required (point, frameshift, mis-sense, etc).
- Tom Freeman
- No topic sentence required.
- When looking at a diagram, just describing won’t be enough. Students need to explain.
- Advice from Mark Little: Focus on Science Practice 1 (use representations and models to communicate scientific phenomena and solve scientific problems.) and Science Practice 6 (work with scientific explanations and theories)
- Really use the AP Course and Exam Description to make sure that you’re teaching essential content (and not teaching anything that’s extraneous.
- Use the AP Formula sheet and make sure that students can handle all the operations
- Corey Mullins
- Position yourself as a coach, working with your students to maximize their performance.
- If you’re taking a pen and paper, in person administration of the test, you can start with whatever question is easiest (but this won’t be possible for digital administrations of the test. In these the questions must be answered in order. More in this below).
- Make sure that students budget their time so that they get through all the questions.
- Read through the layers of the question. Don’t be alarmed by vocabulary and terms you don’t know. Extract what the question is about, and use what you know to respond.
- Look at graphs are tables very carefully.
Responses to Audience Questions
- The only way to prepare students for AP tests is to expose them to as many past AP tests as possible. Have students respond to many FRQs. Teach them how to use the scoring guides to monitor and improve their own performance.
- Make sure that students really dissect a question and answer all parts of the question.
- Encourage your students to spell out their response for the reader.
- Have students label the parts of their response.
- Make sure that students write complete sentences.
- Overwriting (writing everything you know) can be counterproductive, mostly because it can lead students to run out of time. If students write something that’s incorrect, that can undermine a correct point that was previously made.
- Don’t hedge with words like maybe, I think, probably, most likely
- There are 3 practice exams that you can access from the course audit website. Remember: These are to be used only with your students, and not shared beyond that.
- If students forget a specific term, they can probably get the point by explaining the concept. Example: if you can’t say “water is flowing from hypotonic to hypertonic” saying that “water is flowing down its concentration gradient” or “from higher to lower concentration” will probably do the trick.
- Encourage students to be specific in their responses. Natural selection (a process) is not that same as evolution (a result).
- Encourage students to not be overdramatic: Avoid “everything will die” when “many organisms might die” is more accurate.
- Teach your students to use the rubrics. Adhere to them closely (but use your judgment).
- Digital exam advice (see links below)
- Students have to respond to the questions in order (no skipping)
- On the second question, rather than constructing a graph, students will be analyzing a graph.