... the theories and concepts that students have learned in their freshman courses along with incorporating Bioinformatics, which is essential for teaching zoology in the 21st century. systematics morphology discussion pedagogy active learning Phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary...

...” of dragons make the taxa appropriate models for basic phylogenetic analysis in an undergraduate general biology or systematics class. The wyvern, an obviously more primitive, distant cousin of the “true” dragons, is also an appropriate outgroup for these estimations of shared evolutionary history. Separating...

... education literature and national standards documents, whose primary goal is to help teachers assist introductory students in evaluating basic evolutionary datasets. In this short response to Brower's critique, we acknowledge that our activities, which address the complex field of systematics, contain...

.../journals.php?p=reprints . 2015 Student engagement evolution systematics phylogeny Educating high school and undergraduate students in the processes of evolution and confronting their misconceptions is one of the greatest challenges in American science education. Students often enter biology...

..., determine polarity through outgroup comparison, and construct a parsimonious tree based on synapomorphies (shared derived characters). This activity efficiently demonstrates many systematics concepts, including homology, homoplasy (convergence and reversal), polarity, synapomorphy, symplesiomorphy...

... mean 6 standard error of the mean (SEM). Asterisk indicates a value significantly different from that of sugar maple (Student's t-test; P < 0.05). Variation inquiry taxonomy systematics student engagement The general intent of the introductory biology laboratory is to reinforce basic...