The dual-credit anatomy and physiology class in Indian Prairie School District 204 will also count for honors credit beginning next year.
The change will allow the course, taught at a college-level, accelerated pace, to carry a higher weight toward a student’s grade-point average, administrators told school board members this week.
Course review proposes new anatomy and physiology books
The upgrade to honors credit is part of a course review conducted on both the regular-level and dual-credit anatomy and physiology classes available to high school students.
During the review, administrators also determined they’d like to use a new resource to teach the health-related classes beginning next year, said Nicole Howard, assistant superintendent for high schools.
The review team proposes purchasing class texts and six-year digital licenses for two levels of anatomy and physiology books by the publisher Pearson, at a total cost of $117,600. The school board is set to vote on the resource purchases during its next meeting May 4.
Honors weighting to recognize challenging pace of instruction
School board members thanked administrators for analyzing the appropriate weighting for the dual-credit course, which is offered through the College of DuPage.
“I appreciate going and looking at the coursework and awarding the honors designation,” school board member Allison Fosdick said.
Howard said the district recently developed a rubric to determine which weight various levels of courses should receive. She said the anatomy and physiology course is the first of the district’s dual-credit classes to be reviewed under the rubric, which aims to make decisions about credit levels less subjective.
Students in dual-credit anatomy and physiology learn “18 highly specialized topics” about complex body systems at a “pace and depth” that warrant honors credit, Howard said.
“It’s really complex, and it’s a lot of content for our students to digest,” Howard said. “With that level of rigor, we wanted to honor that by offering the honors rate that it deserves.”
Regular course scaled back for accessibility
Students who sign up for the regular level of anatomy and physiology, by contrast, will learn about 12 broader topics focused on the body’s core systems.
“We wanted to make that separation so that students who don’t want to necessarily do the rigor of the college-level course will now take the standard course, because we did scale that one back a little bit to make that more accessible,” Howard said. “So our enrollments, we anticipate, will actually increase — which will match the increase in interest in health-related fields that we have.”
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