SimBiotic Articles and Blog

As I wrote about previously, I recently returned from a conference on changing the way biology is taught in U.S. colleges and universities.

In mid-July, NSF sponsored a conference called Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. They invited several hundred people involved in college biology education to plot out ways of improving biology teaching over the coming decades. There is a bit of hubris in doing this.

Earlier this year, an NPR series "Museums in the 21st Century" highlighted an interesting consequence of the increased focus on state standards in education. As is the case with many supplementary educational experiences, school-based visitation to museums has declined since implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

We spend a lot of time working on our EvoBeaker labs for teaching about evolution, and Darwin's name comes up often both in our labs and in the scientific and educational writing we read as background for our work. Perhaps too often.