We all know that making someone a drawing is a great way to explain scientific ideas. Reviews of textbooks will talk about the quality of the …
Genomic Analysis of Identical Twins Finds Few Differences
There's an intriguing paper in today's issue of Nature. Sergio E. Baranzini and colleagues looked at three pairs of identical twins, two female pairs …
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Better Gene Discovery Through Evolutionary Reasoning
When I introduce evolution in class, I tell my students that the strongest evidence that Darwin was right is the success of modern biology. Evolution …
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SimUText Ecology
Replace your ecology textbook If you've been following our blog, you've seen me make several posts about e-textbooks. One reason I've been following …
The Talented Dr. Fox, Part 2
The Role of Charisma in Teaching In an earlier post, I wrote about a classic paper from the education literature called The Dr. Fox Lecture: A …
Majors vs. Non-majors
Most universities have separate biology classes for non-majors, which are often taken by students who need to fulfill a "science" requirement to …
Lower-Order Thinking & Allocating Limited Brainpower
I'm reading two different documents now which are both, in a way, about testing, but at opposite levels of thinking. The first is the National …
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Can a Number Be Both Even and Odd?
Discuss. I wrote a few weeks ago about a math teacher and professor that was profiled in the NY Times magazine for showing that teachers who know and …
