ERIC Number: EJ745311
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006-Mar
Pages: 3
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0002-7685
EISSN: N/A
Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Helping Students Appreciate Life's Diversity by Building the Tree of Life
Staub, Nancy L.; Pauw, Peter G.; Pauw, Daniel
American Biology Teacher, v68 n3 p149-151 Mar 2006
Introductory biology students can be overwhelmed by the diversity of life. By focusing on learning characteristics of individual taxa, they often lose and miss the larger perspective--that all taxa are connected through evolution, resulting in the Tree of Life. In this article, the authors present an exercise that helps students develop an evolutionary framework of thought--to think of taxa as branches of phylogenetic trees. This exercise helps students: (1) appreciate the evolutionary relationships among organisms and understand how such relationships are determined; (2) understand that there is one Tree of Life--that all of life is connected through evolution; (3) learn that trees are hypotheses, subject to modification with new data; and (4) create a framework to view biodiversity and to review and compare different clades. To master this, students build their own tree of life using digital images of organisms. Visualizing the evolutionary connections between organisms in this way helps students become more evolutionarily literate. The Tree of Life exercise is adaptable to a variety of classes and to all levels of students. (Contains 1 footnote.)
Descriptors: Introductory Courses, Biology, Evolution, Science Activities, Biodiversity, Teaching Methods, Learning Strategies, Active Learning, Science Instruction, Plants (Botany), Computer Assisted Instruction
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A