Member-only story
A Grasp at Meaningful AP Biology Review
Wheat in my Sea of Chaff
I’ve taught AP Biology for so long that I have too much exam review material for much of it to be particularly useful for my students. It took me a long time to learn this lesson. For longer than I might care to admit, I looked at reviewing as a sort of “more the better” situation. If there was something useful for my students to use to review a course, it would always be more better if it was added to all the other review stuff that I had already made/found/etc.
This is not how review works. For anyone. Quicker than you might think, a learner is going to hit a saturation point where there is just too much review stuff to be able to meaningfully navigate it, much less use it effectively. At that point, no matter how much review stuff you have, it will be functionally useless.
And that’s not even considering the fact that every student will need a personalised set of review materials that best target their review needs. Which is both a function of how individuals learn (individually), and at odds with the kinds of review structures that a typically organised school makes available.
How then to proceed?
Since I’ve focused on the issues related to reviewing a subject, I’ve tried a few different approaches. I won’t get into them here…
