Teaching and understanding evolution is challenging because students must synthesize several biological processes that are traditionally taught separately. We developed a set of free online lessons and activities centered on a single evolutionary phenomenon -- why deer mice have different fur colors in different subpopulations -- to help high…

Evolution is one of the most important concepts in biology, but it is rejected by a substantial percentage of religious students due to a perceived conflict with their religious beliefs. The use of religious cultural competence in evolution education (ReCCEE) has been shown to effectively increase evolution acceptance among religious students…

When should students collaborate during inquiry learning using an online learning environment? We compare "continuous collaboration" to "individual predictions" followed by collaborative exploration of natural selection and evolution in a unit featuring interactive models illustrating the marine biodiversity crisis. In the…

An online curriculum about biological evolution was designed according to the "Promoting Evidentiary Reasoning and Self-Regulation Online" (PERSON) theoretical framework to support evidentiary reasoning and self-regulation. An efficacy study was conducted with 83 suburban high school biology students using design-based research methods.…

This case study examined an authentic online learning phenomenon where social conflict, including harsh critique and negative tone, weaved throughout peer-moderated online discussions in an online class. Opening coding and content analysis were performed on 1306 message units and course artifacts. The results revealed that a model of social…

College students often come to the study of evolutionary biology with many misconceptions of how the processes of natural selection and speciation occur. How to relinquish these misconceptions with learners is a question that many educators face in introductory biology courses. Constructivism as a theoretical framework has become an accepted and…

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…

As our understanding of learning focuses on the whole person rather than individual aspects of learning, so the process of learning is beginning to be studied from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines. This handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the contemporary research into learning: it brings together a diverse range of…

We show how an interactive website can help first-year undergraduates acquire independent study skills, and provide a user-friendly way of approaching challenging material in introductory level evolution and ecology. Students embraced the opportunity to undertake self-assessment tasks online, which allowed them to gauge their understanding and…

Inverness Research studied the American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) Seminars on Science program for eight years, from its inception in 1998 to 2006. This paper presents teacher survey ratings for "The Link between Dinosaurs and Birds", along with profiles of three teachers who took the course. Course takers report on the annual…

Inverness Research studied the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Seminars on Science program for eight years, from its inception in 1998 to 2006. In 2008, Inverness Research conducted additional studies of the AMNH's new online course, "Evolution". This paper presents teacher survey ratings for "Evolution", along with…

"Teaching in the Knowledge Society: New Skills and Instruments for Teachers" covers a pedagogical survey of the changes induced by information and communication technology (ICT) in today's society and education. It critically analyzes facts, instruments, solutions, and strategies while suggesting interpretations and hypotheses to develop a new way…