Due to the rigor and pace of undergraduate medical anatomy courses, it is not uncommon for students to struggle and fail initially. However, repetition of coursework places an additional burden on the student, instructor, and institution. The purpose of this study was to compare the exam preparation strategies of repeating and non-repeating…

Mosquitoes (Culicidae) are disease vectors, which are responsible for an estimated one million deaths per year. Female mosquitoes, which need blood for survival and reproduction, collect blood with a disease present from a host, and will transmit that disease from one host to another as it feeds on additional food sources. This continuous feeding…

Digestion is a fundamentally important process for an individual's life. However, the physical process of digestion is hidden inside the body, making it challenging to understand and a particularly difficult topic for students to learn in the classroom. Traditional approaches to teaching body processes include a mixture of textbook teaching and…

Human rights issues can be topics of conflict, resistance, and indifference; thus, these issues are seldom broached in traditional college STEM courses. In this article, I share process, content, and sources used to introduce college students to the biology of the singularity of race and the biology of sexual identity. One or two class meetings on…

Students of physiology are taught that the body's homeostatic mechanisms are in place to maintain the body's internal environment. This is most often associated with maintaining health. Congestive Heart Failure represents a disease in which the body's homeostatic mechanisms worsen the progression of the disease. Using the analogy of Santa Claus…

Open-ended problems are a very effective tool for engaging student interest. In this paper, we report a physics activity that provides insight into the lifestyle of theropod dinosaurs. This activity generates great enthusiasm among the students since virtually everyone is interested in dinosaurs. In the spirit of the "spherical cow"…

Everyone has an aunt or grandfather or other relative who can tell when the weather is changing because his or her joints start to ache or an old injury begins to hurt. This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. This month's issue focuses on three major weather factors and how they affect the human…

This column includes activities inspired by children's literature. This month's trade books teach students about external and internal structures that allow animals and humans to survive. This months trade books are: (1) "Creature Features" (Steve Jenkins and Robin Page); and (2) "Body Actions" (Shelley Rotner and David A.…

The eastern oyster, "Crassostrea virginica," is an ecologically and economically important species in Chesapeake Bay. Oysters are ecologically unique in the Chesapeake Bay because they build a structure known as a bar or reef by attaching to one another over a 45 long period of time. They have been coined the "Ecological Engineers…

In Anatomy and Physiology courses, students often struggle with visualizing structures, or processes, that occur at the cellular level, such as capillary exchange. Whenever available, models can be vital to students' understanding of a topic, particularly when they can be constructed by students in real time. To demonstrate capillary exchange to…

The teaching of histology has changed dramatically with virtual microscopy. Fewer students of histology spend significant time viewing slides on a microscope and instead study images available in digital slide sets, generally accessible via the internet. However, students must still be able to correctly identify the defining characteristics of…

Evolution can be a difficult concept for students, even though it is an organizing principle in biology. It can also be a challenge for teachers to cover evolution properly (or at all) in the classroom, whether due to personal attitudes or lack of knowledge or confidence in the material (Rutledge and Mitchell 2002). Even in some states where…

Studies show that children may not be able to conceptualize some of the topics associated with anatomy, including internal organs and involuntary muscles, because the concepts are too abstract and are not easily visualized. Thus, this article presents activities that incorporate a variety of models and hands-on activities designed to provide…

Students struggle with the amount of information they are expected to learn in undergraduate human anatomy and physiology labs. Often, the models used in labs may look different from the figures or photos in the lab manuals purchased from publishing companies and therefore studying at home with lab manual diagrams can be an unnecessarily…

This article describes a lesson in which high school biology, ecology, environmental science, anatomy, and physiology students can devise hypotheses and test them with scientific data, identify unanswered questions, and design an additional study to answer those questions. This module connects students with exciting research and current science…