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 evolutionary processes. Understanding the causes and consequences of life cycles is especially important when studying parasites with multiple life cycle stages for passing through diverse hosts. We designed a two-part lab activity to help our students gain a better understanding of the ecological interactions driven by parasite life cycles. Part I is a structured guide to reading a peer-reviewed journal article. Part II is a guided exercise in summarizing and interpreting mock experimental data involving a trematode parasite life cycle. These assignments helped students (1) understand how parasite life cycles shape ecological interactions with their hosts, (2) practice making predictions about species interactions using core ecological principles, and (3) practice quantitative reasoning and graph literacy skills by visualizing and interpreting data. We first used this activity as a self-guided lab exercise for an upper-division undergraduate parasitology class that switched from in-person to asynchronous-remote mid-semester. The stepwise structure of the activity allowed us to pinpoint the links in the chain of biological reasoning where students struggled most to guide target topic reviews in subsequent lectures. Here, we provide a summary of the activity, our experience with the activity, and suggestions for adapting the activity for a synchronous-remote or in-person class.

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 scientific literature (PSL), possibly for the same reason: they struggle to integrate the biological facts they know into the larger, and often complicated, biological principles presented in PSL. Our lesson bridges the gap between student understanding of content knowledge and their ability to connect this knowledge to larger biological principles through the integration of PSL and the 5 Core Concepts of Biology (5CCs) identified in the Vision and Change report. We begin by introducing students to PSL using a modified C.R.E.A.T.E. method and continue by walking students through Vision and Change as a way to introduce the 5CCs. Through the use of a matrix table detailing each one of the 5CCs and their related organizational levels, students learn how to integrate PSL and the 5CCs by connecting biological facts contained within PSL to a related biological core concept. Because students have to provide reasoning for why they connected a biological fact to a specific core concept, they begin to see biology as a larger entity, i.e., they begin to see the "big picture" of biology. Our lesson provides a novel strategy for introducing students to PSL.