Data presentation and the new syllabus

September 27, 2014

In an early post, I mentioned the arrival of the Teacher Support Material for the new IB Biology guide and I would like to focus on the processing and presentation of data for this blog. I, like other Biology teachers have been continually frustrated by the diverse...

TSM is here

August 8, 2014

… and so the TSM (teacher support material) for the new course is with us – the IBO provided guidance to the new programme… 2016). The purpose of the teacher support material (https://ibpublishing.ibo.org 08/08/2014) Welcome to the Biology teacher...

The Nature of Science

June 30, 2014

As part of the changes present in the new Biology guide, one of the more significant is the formal introduction of the Nature of Science, referred to as NoS. So what is NoS? Nature of Science (often abbreviated as NoS) is a term that refers to various topics related...

Microbiology

May 9, 2014

My past experience of working with microbiology is small and the schools I have worked in, have generally kept away from using them. So when a student wished to base her extended essay on the manipulation of bacteria from three regions of her skin, and to culture at...

Changes to DP Biology (IV) Exam structure and assessment objectives

April 24, 2014

One of the big areas for change,  can be found in the exam structure. I will work through each paper in turn; Paper 1 A key change is the inclusion of objective 3 questions. The idea being to ask the students to apply knowledge gained, in new situations and for the...

Changes to DP Biology (III) Internal assessment

March 11, 2014

There have been some significant changes to the internal assessment portion of the  Group 4 Diploma subjects, and they include the following: The  weighting of experimental work to the overall grade has been reduced to 20% from 24% (I know this is stating the obvious,...