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    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    "Boost your evolution IQ": An evolution misconceptions game
    Students often enter introductory biology courses with misconceptions about evolution. For example, many students believe that traits arise when a species needs them or that evolutionary processes are goal-oriented. To address these and other...

    Courses: EvolutionEvolution

    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    The Flight Physics Concept Inventory: Reliably Evaluating Aerodynamic Lift, Drag and Associated (Naïve) Concepts of Flight in Class and In-Game
    Students often struggle to transfer conceptual understanding from isolated instruction to a coherent mental model. This is especially true for the context of flight physics, fluid dynamics, or the concepts of aerodynamic lift, drag, stall, center...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    In-class peer grading of daily quizzes increases feedback opportunities
    Educators are familiar with evidence of the benefit that frequent and immediate feedback provides to our students, regardless of class size. We also often find ourselves in a situation where we do not have enough time planned or TA support...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    Making toast: Using analogies to explore concepts in bioinformatics
    Contemporary biology is moving towards heavy reliance on computational methods to manage, find patterns, and derive meaning from large-scale data, such as genomic sequences. Biology teachers are increasingly compelled to prepare students with...

    Courses: BioinformaticsBioinformatics

    Lesson
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    Defining and Understanding Pathogenic Disease: An Engaging Activity that Connects Students' Lived Experiences with their Academic Studies
    Contagious diseases are unavoidable realities of life. Thus, understanding pathogens and their respective diseases is important in many biological subfields including evolution, ecology, health sciences, microbiology, and others. While all college...
    Lesson
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    Taking the Hassle out of Hasselbalch
    Mention pH in a classroom and you can almost see the inner yawn on the faces of your students. The definition may even roll easily from their lips. However, despite multiple exposures to the relationship of pH and pKa throughout a typical...
    Lesson
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    Cutthroat trout in Colorado: A case study connecting evolution and conservation
    Evaluation of evidence is a key process skill for the core competencies of applying the process of science and using quantitative reasoning. This case study enables upper-division biology students to practice these skills by applying evolutionary...
    Lesson
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    Coevolution or not? Crossbills, squirrels and pinecones
    This case reinforces the concept of coevolution as a reciprocal change in genetic structure between or among two or more populations, by having students analyze and interpret data, build a descriptive model of the system, and use data to make...
    Lesson
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    394

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    Who’s That Speci-Mon? Using PokémonTM to Understand Biological Terminology Using Greek and Latin Roots
    We set out to create a fun and engaging activity using recognizable fictional characters, so students get a chance to practice using Greek and Latin roots to create binomial names. Students in biology courses are faced with a plethora of...
    Lesson
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    How Many Squirrels Are in the Shrubs? A Lesson Plan for Comparing Methods for Population Estimation
    Estimating the population sizes of animals is a key skill for any student interested in ecology, conservation, or management. However, counting animals in natural habitats is difficult, and the many techniques that exist each rely on assumptions...
    Lesson
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    Priority Setting in Public Health: A lesson in ethics and hard choices
    Undergraduate life sciences majors, many of whom aspire to work in healthcare and health research, can benefit from early exposure to ethical issues that they may encounter in these careers. This lesson plan introduces students to the tensions...
    Lesson
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    Sex and gender: What does it mean to be female or male?
    This lesson provides three activities to engage non-science major students in a discussion about sex, gender, gender identity, and sex determination. Students prepare for the lesson by reading a short article titled Sex and gender: What is the...
    Lesson
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    Go Extinct! An Award-Winning Evolution Game That Teaches Tree-Thinking as Students Pursue the Winning Strategy
    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...

    Courses: EvolutionEvolution

    Lesson
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    In-Class Workshops to Teach Introductory Biology Students about Undergraduate Research
    Decades of evidence support the premise that undergraduate research experiences are valuable endeavors for science students; however, a lack of knowledge about research and how to get involved can preclude equitable participation. We developed two...
    Lesson
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    Exploring the City of Biofilms: An Engaging Analogy-Based Activity for Students to Learn Biofilms
    Multicellular biofilms constructed by microbes are key aspects of microbiology with significant implications in various fields, including medicine, environmental science, and biotechnology. While bacteria spend nearly all their lives in biofilms,...

    Courses: MicrobiologyMicrobiology

    Lesson
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    How Do Kidneys Make Urine From Blood? Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Filtration, Secretion, Reabsorption, and Excretion
    The function of the kidneys is to help maintain a constant internal environment (homeostasis) by regulating the volume and chemical composition of the blood. This regulation occurs via three fundamental processes: filtration, secretion, and...
    Lesson
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    An undergraduate bioinformatics curriculum that teaches eukaryotic gene structure
    Gene structure, transcription, translation, and alternative splicing are challenging concepts for many undergraduates studying biology. These topics are typically covered in a traditional lecture environment, but students often fail to master and...
    Lesson
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    A Close-Up Look at PCR
    The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a fundamental laboratory technique that allows for the amplification of many copies of a desired DNA target sequence. Despite its prevalence, undergraduate students often have poor comprehension about the...
    Essay
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    Implementing active learning approaches into an upper-division biology course
    In this essay, we present our strategy for implementing active learning strategies into an upper division course on Human Genetics. Our principal goal was to shift from a traditional didactic course design, to one that more clearly placed the...
    Lesson
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    Meiosis: A Play in Three Acts, Starring DNA Sequence
    Meiosis is well known for being a sticky topic that appears repeatedly in biology curricula. We observe that a typical undergraduate biology major cannot correctly identify haploid and diploid cells or explain how and why chromosomes pair before...