As instructors, we continually look for new ways to create equitable learning environments and support learning for all students in our courses. Recently, we have explored ways that we can increase structure to better support students. We have identified four evidence-based elements that we include in our course design and implementation: 1) structured assessments and feedback; 2) structured out-of-class learning; 3) structured class time using inclusive practices; and 4) structured assignments using transparent design. In this essay, we identify some relevant literature to address each of these levels of structure and describe our experiences with implementation at each level to support equitable classroom environments.

Evolutionary trees communicate both the diversity and unity of life, a central and important scientific concept, as highlighted by the Vision and Change undergraduate biology education movement. Evolutionary trees and cladograms are diagrams viewed by biologists as Rosetta Stone-like in how well they convey an enormous amount of information with clarity and precision. However, the majority of undergraduates in introductory biology courses find the non-linear diagram confusing and do not immediately understand the tree-thinking central to interpreting the evolutionary tree’s branching structure. Go Extinct! is an original board game featuring land vertebrates (i.e., amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles) and it is designed to engage students in reading this evolutionary tree. Go Extinct! won the Society for the Study of Evolution’s Huxley Award for outstanding outreach achievements in recognition for how the gameplay itself incentivizes students to identify clades and common ancestors on a stylized tree. The game can be completed in about 30 minutes, which allows instructors time to give follow-up activity sheets that help students transfer their new ability to read a stylized tree into the ability to read more traditional-looking trees found in textbooks and the literature. Overall, teaching the game, playing the game, and completing the follow-up transfer activity can be completed in a 50-minute section. Each game can serve up to 6 students, which means 3 games can cover a section of 18 students. Go Extinct! provides a fun and effective learning experience that students will remember and may even request to play again.

Primary Image: Biologists play Go Extinct! Students who play Go Extinct! gain a mastery of reading an evolutionary tree or cladogram. The winning strategy depends on identifying common ancestors of animal cards in your hand. Photo taken by the author.

These are resources associated with using Pokemon Go to teach concepts in Ecology.

PhyloCards are educational trading cards that teach people about biodiversity, conservation, and ecosystem relationships. We used this educational tool to explore the Wissahickon Valley's biodiversity in Philadelphia, PA, and to engage our college students in learning more about our local species and environmental issues. This activity aims to teach about native and non-native species, food chains, and the human impact on the local ecosystem. The game integrates core ecological concepts like biodiversity and species interactions while touching on human-environment interactions.

This authentic research experience lesson teaches the core concept of systems and the competencies of quantitative reasoning, communication, and the ability to apply science. The research is student driven, the results are unknown, and the students engage in an iterative process to gather data, collaborating with classmates.  It is designed for first-year biology majors, in a class size of 15-30 students who can work in groups of three.  Students will learn to properly design an experiment, work as teams, analyze data, evaluate conclusions, and communicate findings to others. Additionally, this lesson also incorporates self-reflection and peer assessment when students produce a poster as a summative assessment. Over a five–week period, students will explore how an abiotic factor affects growth, reproduction, and survival of Daphnia.  Students are asked to compare their results to published literature. By the end, students should have a better understanding of science as an ongoing process where results are being updated and furthering the state of knowledge.

Beginning undergraduate students in biology need basic laboratory, data analysis, and science process skills to pursue more complex questions in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). To this end, we designed an introductory lesson that helps students learn to use common laboratory equipment such as analytical balances and micropipettes, analyze and present data in Google and Microsoft spreadsheet software, and perform simple descriptive and inferential statistics for hypothesis testing. In this lesson, students first learn to use micropipettes by pipetting specific volumes of water correctly and incorrectly. After determining the masses of the water samples pipetted, students enter the data into a shared Google spreadsheet and then use statistics to test a null hypothesis; ultimately, they determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the mass of water pipetted correctly versus incorrectly. Together, these activities introduce students to important data analysis and science process skills while also orienting them to basic laboratory equipment.

A challenge in introductory biology laboratory courses is to provide students with authentic, engaging research opportunities that allow them to take ownership of their experiments. We present a nine-week introductory biology module that allows students to engage with the process of science, gain experience with various laboratory techniques, and communicate their results to a peer audience. These modules use the inexpensive and accessible invertebrate model of the brine shrimp Artemia, which has many applications from aquaculture to ecology to behavior. Students explore known taxis behaviors in the larval (or “naupliar/nauplii”) stages of these brine shrimp before designing their own experiments, collecting and analyzing data, presenting their results orally, and redesigning their experiments based on peer and instructor feedback. This LessonPlus article highlights the exploration of known taxis behaviors and the scaffolding for having students design their own experiments. We originally designed this module to be highly flexible and used it to teach students both remotely and in-person during the early years of the pandemic. We have since found it to be easily adaptable in terms of timing, materials used, and learning modality. Most importantly, we have observed a number of positive outcomes related to student engagement and proficiency, including increased quality of summative assessments.

Primary Image: Artemia nauplius. A scientific illustration of the nauplius stage of Artemia sp. used in these experiments to study taxis behaviors. ©2024 Liesl V. McCormick.

activities to explore pollination

The purpose of this experiential lesson is to teach introductory to mid-level undergraduate students how to make detailed hydrologic field observations into a conceptual model using a painting medium. Students should have prior knowledge about the hydrologic cycle and the hydrologic budget. Part I is the field component where students make detailed observations about key processes of the hydrologic cycle near a river while canoeing, kayaking, or hiking. Part II is an outdoor art-lab lesson where students explore the intersection of science and art, are introduced to conceptual models, and take their observations and sketches from Part I and create a painting to explore one of five key hydrologic cycle processes. Part III is a post-lesson written assignment for students to reflect on their experience demonstrating their knowledge about the hydrologic cycle in relation to the local hydrology. Equipment needed include a field notebook, paints, a canvas, and handouts. This lesson would be well-suited to an introductory earth science, hydrology, or hydrogeology course and can be helpful when introducing the concept of scientific models.

Growing calls in science education reform have emphasized wide-scale engagement of first-year undergraduate students in authentic research experiences; however, large course enrollments, inadequate student experience, limited resources and departmental inertia often create obstacles to reaching this goal. To help overcome these obstacles, the Department of Biology at James Madison University (JMU) has developed a cost-effective, scalable, and transferable semester-long (14-week) course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) designed for large enrollment introductory biology labs. In this series of labs, first-year students use DNA barcoding to engage in authentic research practices drawn from the fields of ecology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. These labs enable students to identify local species of plants, fungi, and invertebrates using student-generated DNA barcode sequences, which are then shared through a public database. Since their implementation at JMU in 2016, students in these labs have created and shared over 1,500 unique DNA barcode sequences and documented over 300 local species of plants, fungi, and invertebrates. These data are being used in an ongoing project comparing the biodiversity of forest edge versus forest interior habitats, but the labs are adaptable to almost any habitat or taxonomic group. In this article, we provide detailed descriptions of the content, logistics, and implementation of this 14-week series of labs. To our knowledge, this is among the largest-enrollment CUREs being offered to first-year undergraduates in the United States, and we hope that it can be useful to other institutions interested in documenting biodiversity and engaging introductory biology students in authentic research.

Educational games are one active and effective way of engaging students with material while also providing additional motivation to tackle challenging concepts. A particularly popular game concept is the escape room, where students need to work in groups to solve a series of puzzles to prevent disaster from occurring in an imaginary universe, all within a specified amount of time. This paper presents a general guide to constructing an escape room for undergraduate classrooms. Unlike many recently published educational escape rooms, this template does not use any laboratory-based components, making it widely applicable to any class and any level, although it will be most easily adapted to classes that do include analytical components. The puzzles in the game escalate from remembering and understanding concepts to applying and evaluating techniques and data. Unlike many other games and puzzles, an escape room does not reveal the final answers until the allocated time is up, which forces students to work through challenging questions and find solutions within their group to advance in the game. The game provides students many instances for formative assessment and encourages helpful discussions surrounding misconceptions and core course content while they escalate through the challenges.

In this lesson students embark upon a journey through the many ways we come to know a watershed, with foci on its physical geography and our embodied perceptions. This enables students to formulate a holistic understanding of the value of watersheds, situating any future discipline-specific foci within a broad understanding of what watersheds mean to humanity. Required site conditions are simply the bank of any river or stream channel. Equipment needs are minimal. Written data is collected in notebooks. The “data” will address questions of geography and philosophy, such as “what are the physical components of a watershed?” and “what are the roles of humanity in regard to rivers?” This lesson has broad applicability across different regions. It complements quantitative scientific river-based field lessons by actively grounding students’ understanding of humanity’s inherent subjectivity in their perceptions of rivers. The intent of this lesson is to engage with subjectivity, connecting students with the riverine place they are in through an exploration of their perceptions and feelings, ultimately deepening their relationships with rivers and places.