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Peer-Graded Assignment: Evidence for Evolution

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Evolution: A Course for Educators

American Museum of Natural History

4.7 (189 ratings) | 15K Students Enrolled

How are all of the species living on Earth today related? How does understanding evolutionary science contribute to our well-being? In this course, participants will learn about evolutionary relationships, population genetics, and natural and artificial selection. Participants will explore evolutionary science and learn how to integrate it into their classrooms.

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4.7 (189 ratings)

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CE

Aug 17, 2015

Very interesting, Loved the detail and course work, cant wait to do another on from the AMNH. Thank you for a well put together course.

HH

Jul 14, 2017

It is a very interesting course and is presented by great teachers. Would definitely recommend to any one interested in evolution.

From the lesson

Darwin's Second Great Idea - Adaptation via Natural Selection

You will learn about Darwin’s second breakthrough: that adaptation via natural selection is the basic mechanism of evolution. You’ll go behind the scenes with Dr. Cracraft to see how evolutionary biologists use the Museum’s collections. Lastly, you’ll choose a topic from the course and explain how to use it as empirical evidence that supports common ancestry and biological evolution.

Peer-Graded Assignment: Evidence for Evolution7:46

Taught By

Joel Cracraft, Ph.D.
Chair and Lamont Curator
David Randle, Ph.D.
Senior Manager of Professional Development

Transcript

Today we're going to talk a little bit about, your peer graded assignment.

And one of the things you want keep in mind in teaching evolution to your

students is you want them to be

focused on the empirical evidence, for, for evolution.

In other words, you, you want to be dealing with the science.

so that's what we're going to have you do as, as a exercise

in the course, and you'll submit it for peer grading the next week.

so I'll talk a little bit about the assignment.

I'll talk about how the assignment connects to this, the

Next Generation Science Standards movement here in the United States.

Also the Common Core Literacy Standards movement in the United States, as well.

I'll go over the guidelines and some of the procedures for the assignment for you.

In the spring of 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards were released.

and they're going through a process of approval by the states.

if you want to know more about the, the standards, I urge you to take a look at

a video by Dr. Roe Kinsler, who's the senior

director of the science education here at the museum.

And she does a really nice job of sort of explaining the

framework that the standards came from, and all the components of the standards.

in brief, they're made up of three basic components.

So, and each of the standards, each of the, the performance outcome,

expectation, each of the performance expectations, which I'll talk a

little bit about have each of these three elements in them,.

So we have the, the, we have practices

which are basically ideas about how science works.

So you may be familiar with you know the terms inquiry.

So basically these standards have used the practices

as an attempt to try to define what

inquiry is.

So inquiry is not the buzz word that it once was.

crosscutting concepts are ideas that apply across all science domains.

So things like patterns, modelling, things like that.

And then, the disciplinary core ideas are the, are, similar

to what I showed you last week in the benchmark.

So the, the basic, the, the science

content, that we want our students to understand.

So this is a page from the Next Generation Science Standards.

You can see it's organized the top part

here are what we call the performance expectations.

and they're organized as tasks that your students

should be able to do after you finish instruction.

So they're not, they're not for designing instruction.

They're basically for designing assessment.

So there are things to point towards you know when, when you finish your teaching.

just really quickly a primer on reading this.

We're going to actually look at this standard

here, so HSLS4-1 which is to communicate scientific

information that common ancestry and biological evolution

are supported by multiple lines of empirical evidence.

That's going to be your assignment for this week.

and if we want to figure out how the practices, and the

disciplinary core ideas, and the cross cutting concepts relate to this.

you basically look at this code.

So, you look down here.

So, if we see LS4-1, we can see that the disciplinary

core ideas, this idea of evidence of common ancestry and diversity.

and the cross cutting concept here is patterns.

So we're looking for patterns.

So, so patterns in the evidence that will

allow us to infer that biological evolution has occurred.

for the practice is actually off the page here so we

wrote it out for you. We are going to have you actually

communicate to us via text your ideas about how certain aspects, certain things

that Joel has dealt with in the course are or can be used as evidence for evolution.

And you're going to develop those ideas in the

very short paper that you'll submit for peer grading.

So, your assignment this

week, as I mentioned, is to basically, to use content from the course.

So you're going to pick two examples.

some of the things that Joel's talked about already are

trees, so phylogenetic trees, evolutionary trees or the fossil record.

And you're going to describe to us how that is empirical evide-, ev-, how that is

empirical evidence for evolution. so that's basically your assignment, and

that ties directly to the performance expectations

that are in the Next Generation Science Standards.

We would like you to be succinct.

We're, we're going to limit your writing to 600

words not including citations, so add the citations.

it can go up to 700 words, but that's going to be the limit that

the text box in the Coursera platform is going to, going to allow you to submit.

So you're going to choose your two examples.

You're going to determine

how they are empirical evidence for evolution.

And then you're going to write up a brief description.

So suggested format would be a brief introductory paragraph introducing

the two lines of evidence that you're going to talk about.

use a paragraph each, to describe in as much detail as possible in a short amount

of space how the first example is evi-, can be used as evidence for evolution.

do that again

for the second example, and then put together some kind of

concluding paragraph and that should keep you within the 600 word limit.

and then, of course, we would like you to cite your sources.

Donât worry about APA or any special format, as long

as people can find the resources that you used it's fine.

You may want to refer to those in the text when you're

what, when you're referencing things, but you know, don't worry about official

formats for citation.

So if, if you go to the assignment section of the

course, you'll be able to follow links to the text box.

I suggest that you compose your answer and then cut

it, pay, cut and paste it into the text box.

there will be a rubric available, a PDF of the rubric

available so you can follow that as you put together your assignment.

Next week I will give you a clickable version and you'll

be linked to the work of three other students so that

you can click through.

Use the rubric to assess theirs, they will assess yours.

And then in week three of the course

you'll get feedback from the peer grading process.

If you have any questions about this please post in the forums.

there's for, discussion thread that's specifically

related to the assignment that we will

monitor and we will answer any questions that you might have about the assignment.

Really briefly, I wanted to touch on a couple of the, the connections to

the Common Core Literacy Standards that are

ever-present in the United States right now.

one of, what you are really doing during

this assignment is, you're doing some explanatory writing, so

you're, you're taking information from, that was presented

in the course, and you're constructing your own explanation

of how that works for evidence for evolution.

Another thing that it pops up all the time in, in science writing

is writing an argument, so using data

and constructing your own explanations about things.

but this assignment really focuses on this explanatory writing phase.

So I hope that helps you understand

that the expectation for the assignment this week.

as I said we'll be available

to help you in the discussion forums if there's any

questions that come up as you're working through the assignment.

please, you know, engage with your colleagues in the

other discussions that are going on around the topic.

and if there's any questions that you have about the science

that Joel presented we'll try to help you with that as well.

Next week, we'll talk a little bit about some resources that you can use

with your kids for really delving into the practices that we spoke about earlier.

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