Higher education goals include helping students develop evidence based reasoning skills; therefore, scientific thinking skills such as those required to understand the design of a basic experiment are important. The Experimental Design Ability Test (EDAT) measures students' understanding of the criteria for good experimental design through their…

Monohybrid crosses are taught in biology labs across the country using peas and corn. Students studying monohybrid crosses using zebrafish ("Danio rerio") would encounter a new model organism, and those interested in human or veterinary medicine would have increased interest. To this end, our college has implemented a laboratory exercise at the…

In this article we describe a multi-week investigative laboratory in microbial ecology/diversity and nitrogen cycling that we have used in our introductory biology course. This module encourages active student involvement in experimental design, using the scientific literature and quantitative analysis of large data sets. Students analyze soil…

Dissections of single species (e.g., fetal pig) are a common student learning activity in introductory biology courses. Such dissections demonstrate location of anatomical parts and provide dissection practice but provide less opportunity for student critical thinking, numeracy and demonstration of the scientific method. A comparative anatomy lab…

The increase in publications presenting molecular evolutionary analyses and the availability of comparative sequence data through resources such as NCBI's GenBank underscore the necessity of providing undergraduates with hands-on sequence analysis skills in an evolutionary context. This need is particularly acute given that students have been…

We describe a new approach to teaching introductory biology. Our introductory experience for undergraduates is a laboratory course that is entirely inquiry and discovery based. We introduce our students to fundamental concepts in biology in the framework of three multi-week laboratory modules, each of which is an open-ended investigation of a…

Incoming freshmen frequently struggle with the transition from high school to collegiate academics. This appears to be particularly evident in the sciences. Students often lack the self assessment skills and metacognition skills required to self-identify problems with their academic learning strategy. This does not allow them to diagnose and…

Many new instructional theories advocate centering instruction around a set of authentic tasks to improve application and transfer of knowledge and help students take more responsibility for their own learning. At BYU-Hawaii, a general education biology course was redesigned to follow this task-centered approach and then taught to two groups of…

Many undergraduate institutions are dealing with less-than-prepared students entering the biology major. When the biology department at College of Notre Dame of Maryland analyzed data from five past cohorts of prospective biology majors, it was evident that there was a significant correlation between their success in the introductory course in the…

Students enrolled in a large-lecture, non-majors biology course employing a diversified instructional approach featuring both instructor-centered and student-centered techniques evaluated the effectiveness of each approach in fostering course goals. Students perceived both approaches to be effective to some extent. Students indicated that the…

In a study spanning several years and including more than 1600 students, lab attendance was strongly correlated with lab grades (r = 0.64), lecture attendance (r = 0.49), and course grades (r = 0.60) in an introductory biology course. Regardless of the semester, lab attendance was lowest during the first week of the semester, and students who…

Peer-reviewed literature is the single most important forum in which research findings are presented for critical review. College biology students can benefit a great deal from early exposure to this resource, but insufficient background information, technical jargon, and complex statistical analyses often present considerable obstacles to…

This study aimed to facilitate students' entrance to an introductory cell biology course for biology majors. The most prominent difficulty in this introductory course, is students' poor background-knowledge, such as a lack of understanding of very basic concepts and terms, and the huge differences in students' background knowledge. In order to…

A major challenge in teaching the process of science to students is designing and implementing laboratory activities that emulate what is actually done in a research laboratory. To facilitate this effort, science educators have been encouraged to design exercises that span multiple laboratory periods, encourage independent thinking, promote…

This paper presents the course of action and outcome of a teacher-based action research project concerning development and evaluation of an online introductory biology course for non-majors. The research took place in a small community college and compared online and traditional instructional formats. A course was developed in an entirely…