To create and implement meaningful tasks that go beyond the cognitive processes of understanding and that integrate all three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is challenging for both educators and curriculum makers. This issue is compounded when considering a content-rich biology course such as anatomy and physiology that requires first familiarity and understanding before engagement in higher-order thinking. The use of crime scene investigations that encourages students to examine evidence even as they learn specific biology concepts can encourage meaning making about scientific practices and science content. This paper deconstructs the implementation of a crime scene investigation titled the “Jewel Heist,” created by the New York Hall of Science and implemented in twelfth-grade anatomy and physiology classes in a diverse urban high school in the northeastern United States. The NGSS, the Framework for K-12 Science Education , along with Bloom's taxonomy and Krathwohl's revisions, are implicated in this process.

This transformed DNA-extraction lab activity offers a framework that strategically draws upon the essential elements of both scientific and effective teaching practices to establish an alternative approach to the teaching and learning of science. The pedagogical methods utilized throughout this activity encourage students’ motivation, engagement, and learning through inquiry-based, teacher-facilitated scientific practices. Additionally, this activity emphasizes Dimension 1 of the Framework for K–12 Science Education (Scientific and Engineering Practices; National Research Council, 2012 ). In the activity, students worked in groups and were allowed to examine different traditional lab protocols and other resources. The students had the freedom of selecting an independent variable that could possibly have an effect on the DNA extraction. To demonstrate how this activity was implemented in the classroom, a running vignette of a DNA-extraction activity in a high school biology class, in which the teacher adhered to the elements of this framework, is included.

In this practice-based lab, students are provided with four Olympic athlete profiles and simulated blood and urine samples to test for illegal substances and blood-doping practices. Throughout the course of the lab, students design and conduct a testing procedure and use their results to determine which athletes won their medals fairly. All of the materials, which simulate the blood, urine, and testing compounds, are available at the grocery store. This real-world problem engages students to think about blood doping, hormones associated with red-blood-cell production, and detection techniques employed by the World Anti-Doping Agency. The Olympics, as well as the news coverage of Lance Armstrong’s admission to blood doping in 2013, makes this lab more relevant to students’ lives, which is supported by our students’ reactions to the lab.