Description

Many biology instructors find evolution a difficult topic to teach and many students find evolution a difficult topic to learn. Part of this difficulty stems from the complexity of the evolutionary process that requires knowledge spanning across biological subdisciplines to fully understand. The Evo-Ed (http://www.evo-ed.org) project provides resources to help educators teach evolution using integrative examples of trait evolution. Pre- and post-course assessments indicated that students who learned evolution in this context were better able to explain the molecular basis of mutation, describe how mutations lead to phenotypic change and make mechanistic links between genotypes and phenotypes. In this interactive BioQUEST workshop session, participants will learn about the integrative cases of trait evolution. By the end of the session, participants will be able to implement one or more integrative case in a classroom setting. Stemming from this session, participants will work on developing resources that can supplement and build upon this approach to evolution education.

Cite this work