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    Lesson
    979

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    243

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    Helping Students to Metacognitively Read Scientific Literature With Talking to the Text
    Reading primary scientific literature enhances students’ understanding of material, increases their self-efficacy, and critical thinking skills. However, scientific articles often present multiple challenges to the students, the first among...
    Lesson
    3748

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    550

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    Knowing your own: A classroom case study using the scientific method to investigate how birds learn to recognize their offspring
    Understanding the scientific method provides students with a necessary foundation for careers in science-related fields. Moreover, students can apply scientific inquiry skills in many aspects of their daily lives and decision making. Thus, the...
    Lesson
    3543

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    504

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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
    1781

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    370

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    Exploring Primary Scientific Literature through the Lens of the 5 Core Concepts of Biology
    Biology students at the undergraduate level usually excel in knowing biological facts; however, they often struggle with connecting these facts to specific biological principles. In parallel, undergraduate students often struggle to read primary...
    Lesson
    1684

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    349

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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...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
    2966

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    467

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    A Strategy for Teaching Undergraduates to Write Effective Scientific Results Sections
    Most undergraduate instructors would agree that learning to write about data in the style of a scientific research paper is a worthy goal for their students.  However, many hesitate to tackle the challenge of teaching scientific writing in...
    Teaching Tools and Strategies
    1069

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    195

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    Wikipedia in the Science Classroom
    Despite research suggesting that writing-to-learn exercises (WTL) in the classroom are associated with increased student learning, WTL is still not widely implemented in science courses. To provide our students with a meaningful WTL exercise that...
    Lesson
    3996

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    473

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    A Classroom Intervention to Reduce Confirmation Bias
    STEM students are often unable to recognize cognitive bias in their own disciplines, and simply describing cognitive bias to students has shown to be insufficient to improve critical thinking. However, habitual metacognitive techniques show...
    Lesson
    414

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    35

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    Space Mission Ecology: Making Connections Among Science Disciplines Through the Lens of a Unique Plant
    With this case study, we aim to increase awareness of essential services plants provide to society, as well as the importance of fundamental aspects of ecology for other disciplines and the interconnectedness among different fields of science in...
    Lesson
    914

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    268

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    Population Ecology of the Northern Spotted Owl
    The mathematical modeling of populations utilizing field-collected demographic data is an important component of lab curricula in a variety of undergraduate biology lab courses. During the global pandemic brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in...
    Lesson
    945

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    228

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    Exploring the Broader Impacts of Science and Society in an Active Learning Environment
    Science and society have always been intertwined. Today, scientists are increasingly encouraged to interact with the public by conducting transparent and participatory engaged scholarship, as opposed to the prevailing one-way transfer of...
    Lesson
    1502

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    208

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    0

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    Modeling Strep Throat Detection, Infection, and Spread Using an SIR Model and the Vensim Simulation Software
    The overarching goal of this lesson is to provide students with an opportunity to gain experience making and using biological models. Biological modeling can be used to investigate complex, real-world problems so that predictions can be made about...
    Lesson
    2697

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    233

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    Integrating Community Ecology Into the Study of Parasites: Exploring the Effect of Host Behavior on Parasite Transmission Rates
    Organismal life cycles are often presented as a set of facts to memorize in undergraduate biology courses. This approach is cognitively demanding for students and fails to convey how central life cycle diversity is in shaping ecological and...
    Essay
    939

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    189

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    Strategies for developing a science communicator through authentic science writing assignments
    To prepare biology undergraduates to be able to read and evaluate the primary literature, it is beneficial to teach students how to write documents in the style of professional science style manuscripts. By breaking manuscripts into individual...
    Lesson
    1575

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    434

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    Using Structured Decision Making to Explore Complex Environmental Issues
    Environmental issues are inherently complex, often requiring multiple interested parties to come together before agreeing on a solution. Structured decision making is a tool used by federal and state management agencies to find solutions that...

    Courses: EcologyEcology

    Teaching Tools and Strategies
    2392

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    204

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    0

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    An Interactive Protocol for In-Classroom DNA Extraction
    Using commonly available materials, this tool allows students to extract DNA, exploring DNA chemistry and the principles of experimental design and execution. We take a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach encouraging students to...
    Lesson
    401

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    26

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    Adapting a Traditional Laboratory Exercise to Become Inquiry Based: An Example With an Introductory Biology Lab in Diffusion
    Authentic research experiences are effective in fostering self-efficacy and increasing retention in STEM, particularly among minoritized student populations. Many instructors have sought to bring these to a wide range of students in the form of...
    LessonPlus
    2064

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    169

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    The Power of Place: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience Studying Urban Ecology, Local Apple Trees and Disease Susceptibility
    Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) offered early in an undergraduate student’s career have the potential to include a greater number and diversity of students than one-on-one mentored research. CUREs that use a...

    Courses: EcologyEcology

    Lesson
    790

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    89

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    Discovery and Invention: A Reflection on Representation in Science
    Despite increased awareness of the lack of equity and inclusion in the STEMM classroom, lessons on DEI topics are treated as separate to the scientific curriculum being taught. Rarely are intentional reflections and conversations on the lack of...
    Lesson
    2299

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    468

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    From Dirt to Streptomyces DNA
    The purpose of this semester-long Lesson is to give students an authentic, course-based undergraduate research experience during which they learn basic and advanced microbiological and molecular biology techniques. This project begins with the...

    Courses: MicrobiologyMicrobiology