A novel activity was designed to introduce students to the concepts of natural selection and life history using an active-learning, constructivist format. It consisted of two parts: 1) a brief introduction to the basic mechanism of natural selection, and 2) a game that introduces life-history strategies. The activity was designed for use in the college classroom. It was shown to be an effective means of fostering a deep and transferrable conceptual understanding of the principles of natural selection specifically through the lens of life-history strategies. The activity is available in the supporting materials. It takes approximately one 50-minute period to complete.

Primary Image: Student Performing Life History Activity, a picture of a student filling out the life history game component of this activity.

A novel activity was designed to introduce students to the concepts of natural selection and life history using an active-learning, constructivist format. It consisted of two parts: 1) a brief introduction to the basic mechanism of natural selection, and 2) a game that introduces life-history strategies. The activity was designed for use in the college classroom. It was shown to be an effective means of fostering a deep and transferrable conceptual understanding of the principles of natural selection specifically through the lens of life-history strategies. The activity is available in the supporting materials. It takes approximately one 50-minute period to complete.

Primary Image: Student Performing Life History Activity, a picture of a student filling out the life history game component of this activity.

University capstone projects can offer science students a rich research experience that illustrates the process of doing scientific research, and can also help students better choose future academic and career pathways. While capstone projects are an effective component of students' learning in the sciences, they are resource and labor intensive for supervising faculty and are not always logistically feasible in understaffed and/or under-resourced departments and colleges. A good compromise is to incorporate a significant research component into upper division classes. This article documents a project I have incorporated into a plant ecology course that I teach every spring. This project gives students a taste of what practicing ecologists do in their professional lives. Students learn how to survey vegetation and environmental factors in the field, apply several statistical analysis techniques, formulate testable hypotheses relevant to a local plant community, analyze a large shared data set, and communicate their findings both in writing and in a public presentation. Over the weeks required for this project, students learn that doing science is quite different from how they typically learn about science. Most say that, while this project is one of the hardest they have completed in their time in university, they appreciate being treated like a fellow scientist rather than as "just a student." Additionally, students' findings often reveal complex and subtle interactions in the plant community sampled, providing further insight to and examples of emergent properties of biological communities.

A successful scientist combines skill, creativity, and the art of persuasion to excel in his or her field of study. Critically important for the professional scientist is the ability to not only conduct research, but also to conceive a project and obtain funding to support research goals. As students grow in their scientific process skills over the course of their training, they are often surprised by the structures and processes used by professional scientists to procure funds for their work. We describe a semester-long experience in which students engage the process of science to design an innovative research plan on a topic that is relevant to the scientific community and society. Research teams seek funding to pursue a novel, high-impact research question, and submit proposals for peer review in a mock NSF-style study section. The module design uses a scaffolded series of writing and peer review activities, and culminates in a Pecha Kucha event in which students orally pitch and defend their proposal and vote for the best in session. The module may be scaled and adapted to suit a wide range of contexts where proposal writing and peer review is emphasized.

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 section assignments, we can distribute instruction across a four-year undergraduate curriculum to scaffold writing practice mastery. These skills are aided by peer review, writing tutor instruction, and assignment repetition. Students gain not only competency in writing about the discipline, but can better understand and critically evaluate the written work of others. The science writing and communication skills gathered over the course of this curricular framework provide all students with expertise in accessing science themselves and disseminating science to others.

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 them is the unfamiliar nature of scientific texts: their high information density, formal language, and abundance of scientific jargon. In this lesson, students are taught the Talking to the Text method to metacognitively read scientific texts. The Talking to the Text method, which is part of the Reading Apprenticeship approach, enables students to have a metacognitive conversation with a scientific text, annotating it with their own questions, connections to previous knowledge, predictions, and drawings. The method is introduced through instructor’s modeling, individual practice, peer interactions, and class discussions. The collaborative approach of this lesson normalizes the struggles that students face when reading complex scientific texts. We have successfully used the Talking to the Text method in an introductory biology course with diverse students who often do not have experience in reading dense scientific texts. We find that this method promotes inclusion and holds students accountable to address what they do not understand in the text. In a survey, half of the students indicated that they were still using the method at the end of the semester. Students commented that the method improved their understanding of concepts, built their metacognitive skills, and helped them connect new information with what they already know. We believe that this method can be valuable for all students who are starting to read complex scientific texts.

Primary Image: Using Talking to the Text to metacognitively read scientific literature. A student reads a scientific text using the Talking to the Text method. The student engages in metacognitive conversation with the text by identifying the confusing parts of the text, making connections between new and existing knowledge, and drawing pictures of concepts or experiments.