BioSkills Guide: Development and National Validation of a Tool for Interpreting the Core Competencies.

To excel in modern science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, biology majors need a range of transferable skills, yet competency development is often a relatively underdeveloped facet of the undergraduate curriculum. We have elaborated the core competency framework into a resource called the BioSkills Guide, a set of measurable learning outcomes that can be more readily implemented by faculty. Following an iterative review process including more than 200 educators, we gathered evidence of the BioSkills Guide's content validity using a national survey of more than 400 educators.

Short lesson plan associated with increased acceptance of evolutionary theory and potential change in three alternate conceptions of macroevolution in undergraduate students.

Undergraduates commonly harbor alternate conceptions about evolutionary biology; these alternate conceptions often persist, even after intensive instruction, and may influence acceptance of evolution. We interviewed undergraduates to explore their alternate conceptions about macroevolutionary patterns and designed a 2-h lesson plan to present evidence that life has evolved. We identified three alternate conceptions during our interviews: that newly derived traits would be more widespread in extant species than would be ancestral traits, that evolution proceeds solely by anagenesis, and that lineages must become more complex over time.

Evaluating two approaches to helping college students understand evolutionary trees through diagramming tasks.

To understand evolutionary theory, students must be able to understand and use evolutionary trees and their underlying concepts. Active, hands-on curricula relevant to macroevolution can be challenging to implement across large college-level classes where textbook learning is the norm. We evaluated two approaches to helping students learn macroevolutionary topics.