An interdisciplinary team of science and education faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and several Chicago-area community colleges developed and implemented a series of four integrated, inquiry-based science courses for preservice elementary school teachers. All four courses are based on guiding principles taken from the rich…

Writing can be a powerful tool for learning biology. Writing assignments in biology could help students personalize and understand the biology knowledge they are studying. In this article, the authors present the "Botanical Sense of Place" (BSP), a convenient and easy-to-use writing template that they developed to elicit and probe students' prior…