If one were to track Honors Biology and AP Biology, one is likely to find that they travel curiously similar and parallel paths.  There’s a reason for this (and not just because it makes my life easier).  Honors students are building the skill scaffold that will support them in AP Biology.  Such skills include hands-on lab techniques, critical and analytical thinking and technical writing.  AP Biology students routinely use the same techniques as Honors students but are asked to design and execute their own experiments and provide a higher level of quantitative analysis and reasoning to explain results.  In today’s lab exercise, Honors Biology students were tasked with harvesting root tips and preparing them, step-by-step, for microscopic analysis of the phases of mitosis (cell division).  The goal of this experiment is to estimate the relative time cells spend in any one phase of the mitotic cycle.  This is a baseline activity.  In an AP variation, students use the same technique to prepare a control sample (baseline) and one treated with indole-3-acetic acid, a plant hormone that induces cell division.  Like their Honors counterparts, they must determine the relative frequencies with which cells are found in a specific mitotic phase but they must also perform a chi-square analysis to determine whether any measured difference between the observed and expected data is statistically significant (to within a 95% confidence level).  One technique, two levels of inquiry.

This alignment of the two programs has been ongoing this entire semester.  There is, of course, an ulterior motive (isn’t there always?).  It is hoped that these challenges whet students’ appetites to carry out independent research projects that become capstones to their years at CHS or that they can explore further in college.