The ability to evaluate scientific methodology has always been a key feature at A-level Biology, but is creeping in more and more to GCSE Biology. Personally, I couldn’t be more happy! This is REAL science and will equip students to be scientifically literate in their every day lives. I’ve been working with Year 11 this week in the context of the disease topic, to evaluate some articles on causes of disease from newspapers. I’ve given them all a copy of this great infographic from Compound Chem to stick in their books and use as a checklist. I’ve accidentally made them too ruthless and have had to back-track a bit today and change the title of this to “spotting bad AND GOOD science!”
Last week I started out by looking at the A-level questions (see resources below) and working through them together using the visualiser. This was they could ‘see’ my thought processes as I pulled my face at small sample sizes and studies conducted in only one country etc. We used these case studies as a chance to think about control groups, blind trials, placebo effect etc and to discuss everything on the infographic. This morning I printed off some articles with wide margins and asked them to annotate evaluation points on them. They’ve done a great job!
Resources:
Alevel past paper questions
Data and Disease Exam Questions
Data and Disease Exam Questions MS
Articles to evaluate
bad science articles to annotate
Pedagoggles 