Gateway science courses are an ongoing obstacle to recruitment into STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Students come into courses that have a high cognitive load, which makes success in the course challenging. Instructional design can be used to reduce cognitive load. The findings demonstrate that leveraging pre- and…

The Physiology Core Concept of flow down gradients is a major concept in physiology, as pressure gradients are the key driving force for the bulk flow of fluids in biology. However, students struggle to understand that this principle is foundational to the mechanisms governing bulk flow across diverse physiological systems (e.g., blood flow,…

The primary purpose of this study was to compare academic variables from students participating in mixed teaching methods/course revitalization biology courses to those in traditional courses at two community colleges in Tennessee. A two-group comparison design using archived data was used, which evaluated differences in final grades, exam scores,…

This paper describes an introductory biology course for undergraduates that heavily incorporates quantitative problem solving in activities and homework assignments. The course is broken up into a series of units, each organized around a motivating biological question or theme. Homework assignments address the theme or question, and typically…

Formative assessments (FA), which can occur in or out of class, are a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the material, to see progress, and to receive feedback from instructors related to their learning process. Examples of in-class FAs include clicker questions with peer discussion, while homework assignments are an example of…

In this paper the muscular activity will be treated from a physical point of view, considering the main physical parameters that can be quantified. A brief and simple theoretical treatment will be followed by some homeworks for students. The problems have a difficulty degree typical of an undergraduate class, and the arguments have been chosen…

The flipped classroom has the potential to improve student performance. Because flipping involves both preclass preparation and problem solving in the classroom, the means by which increased learning occurs and whether the method of delivering content matters is of interest. In a partially flipped cell biology course, students were assigned online…

Flipped learning (FL) has had a substantial impact on higher education worldwide, prompting active dialog among educational researchers and practitioners. It is widely accepted that the value of FL lies in enabling in-depth, learner-centered learning experiences by offloading content delivery onto pre-class online learning. The in-class component…

Phylogenetic trees have become increasingly important across the life sciences, and as a result, learning to interpret and reason from these diagrams is now an essential component of biology education. Unfortunately, students often struggle to understand phylogenetic trees. Style (i.e., diagonal or bracket) is one factor that has been observed to…

Providing students with one-on-one interaction with instructors is a big challenge in large courses. One solution is to have students interact with their peers during class. Reciprocal peer tutoring (RPT) is a more involved interaction that requires peers to alternate the roles of "teacher" and "student." Theoretically,…

A flipped-classroom environment generally strives to create more in-class time for activities that enhance student learning, while shifting some content delivery to outside the classroom through the use of short didactic videos. We compared a flipped-classroom setting with the traditional ("control") setting for an accelerated…

In flipped classrooms, lectures, which are normally delivered in-class, are assigned as homework in the form of videos, and assignments that were traditionally assigned as homework, are done as learning activities in class. It was hypothesized that the effectiveness of the flipped model hinges on a student's desire and ability to adopt a…

My study was to discover the perceptions of general secondary senior high school biology teachers about the application of curriculum 2013. Their further opinions of biology topics and the instructional practices in the class have supported the findings of this study. In addressing this study, general senior secondary school (GSSS) biology…

Calls to bring interdisciplinary content and examples into introductory science courses have increased, yet strategies that involve course restructuring often suffer from the need for a significant faculty commitment to motivate change. Minimizing the need for dramatic course reorganization, the structure, reactivity, and chemical biology…

Phylogenetic trees are widely used visual representations in the biological sciences and the most important visual representations in evolutionary biology. Therefore, phylogenetic trees have also become an important component of biology education. We sought to characterize reasoning used by introductory biology students in interpreting taxa…