Students sometimes struggle to organize complex concepts and visualize the connectedness of hierarchical groups, yet much of the biological sciences depends on ranking, ordering, or grouping of information. Diagnosing disease, converting units, and evolutionary relationships all follow stepwise ranking of groups of information. This article presents a cooperative, low-stakes, inexpensive method for novice students to organize hierarchical information. As an example, students work together placing and rearranging animal cards according to taxonomic and evolutionary relationships along a string using shared characteristics. The cards provided address Next Generation Science Standards pertaining to inheritance/variation (LS3) and unity and diversity (LS4). I provide a detailed description of the activity as well as the tools needed to perform this lesson.

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 the connections between biology and human rights were all that was necessary for students to recognize that science courses in fields such as human anatomy and physiology should address human rights issues; science courses can be used as venues to help explain human differences, and these discussions can be of personal significance and use to students.

Problem-based learning via virtual exchange affords opportunities for students to learn biology while developing abilities to learn about and work with diverse others. We describe an activity using these methods, with goals for students to develop useful cell structure analogies, analyze how analogies are not perfect representations of target concepts, practice working with diverse others, deepen cell structure knowledge, and learn about people from another culture. We explain the framework for the activity and share student evaluation data. The activity had U.S. and Egyptian high school girls compare their Phoenix and Cairo homes, create an imagined combined home, construct an analogy for how cell structures and organelles are like parts of this home, and then analyze their analogy to see where it breaks down. The activity does not require special materials, only internet access through a computer or mobile phone and access to Google Docs. Students used critical and creative thinking, first to construct their analogies and then to analyze those analogies. Evaluation data suggest that students learned from the activity, enjoyed it, and appreciated the opportunity to work with someone from a different culture.

Interactions are at the core of many ecological and evolutionary forces in nature. Plant–soil interactions provide a rich example of the interconnectedness of living systems, but they are hidden from everyday view and overshadowed in the classroom by more popular teaching examples involving animals, reptiles, or invertebrates. To highlight the importance and relevance of plant–soil relationships, we devised a simple role-playing activity suitable for college students. Specifically, the activity simulates how feedbacks between plants and soil environments influence plant species abundance and community richness. With this activity, students will gain a better understanding of these prolific, but overlooked, forms of biological interactions that impact the diversity and functioning of ecosystems.

Undergraduates in ecology and conservation biology courses often lack a clear understanding of how to do fieldwork and utilize data analysis to answer complex questions. This is unfortunate, because with proper training these students could identify and address some of today's most pressing environmental issues. I present a simple, problem-based learning activity that provides students a new approach to understanding two important topics in the environmental sciences – how biodiversity is distributed across landscapes and how habitat loss can affect this biodiversity. This activity helps students explore foundational concepts in biology, enables them to collect data in a simplistic field setting, and introduces them to statistical analyses and modeling. In addition, it also teaches students how to ask questions, synthesize data, and address an issue using the same approaches that conservation practitioners utilize in the real world.

In this inquiry activity, community-level physiological profiling (CLPP) with EcoPlates is described to quantitatively depict the community of microorganisms situated in a natural environment. Students can develop their own hypotheses and carry out experimentation about the makeup of microbial communities using EcoPlates. There are many independent variables that can be assessed or changed to determine how environmental differences can play important roles in the types of microorganisms that are found in an environment.