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…

Increasing public concern over the use of animal dissection in education is driving development and testing of alternatives to animal use. Clay modeling has proven successful in achieving comparable or superior learning at postsecondary levels, but it has not yet been tested at secondary levels. This study tested the effectiveness and appeal of…

We have developed an upper-level undergraduate laboratory exercise that enables students to replicate a key experiment in developmental biology. In this exercise, students have the opportunity to observe live chick embryos and stain the apical ectodermal ridge, a key tissue required for development of the vertebrate limb. Impressively, every…

We present a new use for a poorly preserved turtle specimen that teachers can easily use in demonstrating vertebrate anatomy or adaptive herpetology at the high school or college level. We give special attention to illustrating the sigmoid flexure of the neck as certain turtles withdraw their heads. This ability is anatomically and biologically…

A simple and inexpensive method of monitoring the movement of an isolated frog heart provides comparable results to those obtained with a force transducer. A commercially available photoresistor is integrated into a Wheatstone bridge circuit, and the output signal is interfaced directly with a recording device. An excised, beating frog heart is…

Over the past 10 years, college textbooks in human anatomy and physiology have typically presented the events of the ovulatory menstrual cycle in a linear format, with time in days shown on the x-axis, and hormone levels, follicular development, and uterine lining on the y-axis. In addition, the various events are often shown over a 28-day cycle,…

In this activity, students examine nine hominin skulls for specialized features and take measurements that will enable them to determine the relatedness of these species. They will ultimately place each specimen on a basic phylogenetic tree that also reveals the geological time frame in which each species lived. On the basis of their data, and…

Teaching and learning animal anatomy has a long history in the biology classroom. As in many fields of biology, decades of experience teaching anatomy have led to the unofficial selection of model species. However, in some cases the model may not be the best choice for our students. Our struggle to find an appropriate model for teaching and…

Many anatomy students begin the course with a misconception that human males and females do not have the same number of ribs. At the root of that misconception is Genesis 2:21-22, in which God removes a rib from Adam to make Eve. Removal of a body part is a surgical procedure, and one does not pass on the results of surgery to one's offspring. The…

Heart valves play a vital role in efficient circulation of the blood, and the details of their physical structure are related crucially to their function. However, it can be challenging for the learner to make the mental connection between anatomical structures of valves and the changing pressure gradients that the valves experience and come to an…

Because of shrinking budgets and computerized virtual dissection programs, many large and small institutions are closing the door on traditional and expensive cadaver dissection classes. However, many health-care educators would argue there is still a place for cadaver dissection in higher education, so the continuing challenge is to provide the…

As a science teacher, I regularly use outside reading assignments (e.g., news articles) to help develop my students' understanding of topics addressed in my anatomy class. However, I have found that in simply reading texts, students often fail to (1) understand the context of the science discussed, (2) make the connections between ideas…

Mainstream scientists often claim that australopithecines such as the specimen nicknamed "Lucy" exhibit anatomy intermediate between that of apes and that of humans and use this as evidence that humans evolved from australopithecines, which evolved from apes. On the other hand, creationists reject evolution and claim that australopithecines are…

Instead of dissecting animals, students create small clay models of human internal organs to demonstrate their understanding of the positioning and interlocking shapes of the organs. Not only is this approach more environmentally friendly, it also forces them to learn human anatomy--which is more relevant to them than the anatomy of other…

Clay models have proved to be useful teaching aids for many topics in biology that depend on three-dimensional reasoning. Students studying embryonic development struggle to mentally reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of embryos and larvae by observing prepared slides of cross-sectional slices. Students who build clay models of embryos…