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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

    Lesson
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    Furry with a chance of evolution: Exploring genetic drift with tuco-tucos
    Genetic drift is an important mechanism of evolution, yet undergraduates often fail to understand how it leads to evolutionary change due in part to its random nature. This lesson plan describes a simulation-based activity that allows students to...

    Courses: EvolutionEvolution

    Lesson
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    Escape Zoom!: Reviewing Introductory Evolution Content Using an Escape Room Format
    Reviewing and integrating key concepts and learning goals at the end of a biology course can be overwhelming to students and instructors alike. Often end-of-term review sessions in preparation for final exams are heavily based on memorization, and...
    Lesson
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    A Modeling Exercise in Sexual Selection using a Student-Created Bird Species
    Evolution-centered lessons at the undergraduate level can often be jargon-heavy, propagate misconceptions if taught ineffectively, and be uninteresting to students who may not see the relevancy of such concepts. This activity provides a fun and...
    Lesson
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    Application of a Bacterial Experimental Evolution System to Visualize and Teach Evolution in Action: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience
    Concepts of evolution are typically taught through examples of extremely long timescales, which do not always resonate broadly. Here, we describe a course-based undergraduate research experience tailored for junior and senior undergraduate biology...
    Lesson
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    Building Trees: Introducing evolutionary concepts by exploring Crassulaceae phylogeny and biogeography
    Teaching evolutionary theory is foundational for all biological sciences and a key aspect of overall science literacy. The conceptual framework for understanding evolution relies on thinking clearly about evolutionary trees (phylogenetics) and how...
    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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    It's a bird! It's a plane! It's biomechanics!
    Biomechanics is a discipline that draws from physics and engineering principles to understand the movement and structure of living organisms. It is highly interdisciplinary in nature and can be incorporated into general biology and ecology...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    SCIENCE/Fiction: Modular Template for Class Design
    We present a modular scaffold for designing an introductory seminar using speculative fiction and science papers to welcome university undergraduates to the biology major. A list of twelve possible topics is included, such as Memory, Parasites,...
    Lesson
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    Defining Life: Exploring Creativity, Scientific Discovery, and Biology Core Concepts in a Disciplinary First-Year Seminar
    This unit, Defining Life, engages students in thinking like scientists, applying creativity to science, and learning biology core concepts as they explore the defining characteristics of life. This unit provides an example of a curriculum designed...
    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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    Student-Generated Analogies for Learning about Information Flow
    Using analogies is a standard practice for both teaching and communicating ideas in science. Here we upend the traditional lesson, where the instructor provides a fully constructed analogy and explains it, by having the students develop a complex...
    Lesson
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    Animal Behaviour Case Study Lessons in Communication, Migration, and Parental Care Using the Jigsaw Approach
    Animal behaviour courses integrate concepts across biological disciplines and are particularly well suited for collaborative, student-focused teaching strategies. Case Studies can positively impact students by...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
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    A 360˚ View of COVID-19
    In March 2020, institutions underwent a massive transition to distance learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With so little time to devise new materials to maximize learning in the new virtual environment, instructors devised a variety of...
    Lesson
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    What is Speciation, How Does It Occur, and Why Is It Important for Conservation?
    Speciation provides a framework for classifying biodiversity on Earth and is a central concept in evolutionary biology. To help undergraduate students learn about speciation, we designed a student-centered lesson that uses active-learning...
    Lesson
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    Chilling in the Cold: Using Thermal Acclimation to Demonstrate Phenotypic Plasticity in Animals
    The lesson plan described here provides students hands-on, scientific experiences that relate to the globally important issue of climate change and its impacts on animals. Students use the scientific method and basic components of experimental...
    Lesson
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    Teaching Biodiversity with Museum Specimens in an Inquiry-Based Lab
    In response to the growth of biology datasets and broad efforts to digitize data, an increasingly important skill for science students is the management and analysis of large datasets. We designed an inquiry-based lab module to introduce students...
    Lesson
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    Using Bioinformatics and Molecular Visualization to Develop Student Hypotheses in a Malate Dehydrogenase Oriented CURE
    Developing student creativity and ability to develop a testable hypothesis represents a significant challenge in most laboratory courses. This lesson demonstrates how students use facets of molecular evolution and bioinformatics approaches...
    Lesson
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    An Introduction to Eukaryotic Genome Analysis in Non-model Species for Undergraduates: A tutorial from the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching
    Advances in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology have led to development of many research methods for analyzing genomic data. Students studying biology at the undergraduate level must hone their skills at genomic analysis to participate in...
    Essay
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    An Active Textbook Converts "Vision and Tweak" to Vision and Change
    Multiple reports over more than a century have documented the problems with the way introductory biology has been taught in most colleges and universities. An influential recent report, Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, has...