The purpose of this page is collect a variety of resources that pertain to college teaching. Included are links to both relevant posts on my blog and links to outside resources that I’ve found to be useful or informative. Please leave a comment below if you know of good teaching resources that should be included here.

General:

• What the Best College Teachers Do (book)
• CBE-LSE (leading biology education journal)
• Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Education at Carnegie Mellon (highly recommended)
• Carl Weiman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Colombia (highly recommended)
• SABER (Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research)
• OpenStax: Iniative that provides free, high quality, digital textbooks for a variety of common undergraduate courses (including biology). I used their Concepts of Biology in the BIOL310 course I taught at American River College. Students are already under a lot of financial stress – consider whether that $200 textbook is really worth it.
• Blog post about using backward design to align your activities and assessments with course learning goals
• This Will Revolutionize Education: great video on tech fads in education that nails the real role of teachers

Active Learning:

• 5 active learning strategies you can use in your classroom (blog post)
• Meta-analysis of studies on the impact of active learning in science classrooms: Freeman et al, PNAS 2014
• Interview with Dr. Lisa Auchincloss, a bio-education postdoc, who discusses implementing active learning in biology classrooms

Assessment:

• Science Education Initiative (SEI): features course materials, including clicker questions and concept inventories for a variety of STEM courses from the University of Colorado and the University of British Columbia
• Clicker resource page from the Carl Wieman Institute at UBC
• Writing Good Multiple Choice Questions (from Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching)
• Blog post about using formative assessments to help students learn
• Great review article covering the history of grading practices in American higher education, as well as current research on how grading practices impact student learning: Schinske and Tanner, CBE-LSE 2014
• Article describing the Blooming Biology Tool – an implementation of Bloom’s Taxonomy tailored for college biology courses: Crowe et al, CBE-LSE, 2008

Learning Styles:

• Review article that provides an overview of different theories of learning styles (with a focus on VARK and multiple intelligences) and discuses how knowledge of learning styles can be used to improve student outcomes: Tanner and Allen, CBE-LSE, 2004

General Science

• Understanding Science – great UC Berkeley site that has K-16 resources for understanding the scientific process, with good historical examples.

Molecular Biology and Genetics:

• Virtual molecular biology labs covering DNA extraction, PCR, gel electrophoresis, and microarrays (from the University of Utah)
• Learn.Genetics: website from the University of Utah with lots of videos (some interactive) that explain concepts and techniques in genetics, cell biology, and evolution

Plant Biology:

• Teaching Tools in Plant Biology from the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB)
• The Plant Biology TREE (Tool for Research Engaged Education) at University of Leeds
• PlantED Digital Library: a collection of plant biology education resources from the Botanical Society of America
• Botany Word of the Day: blog with definitions and pictures of a huge array of plant structures

Phylogenetics and Evolution

• Misconceptions about Evolution (from UC Berkeley)
• Allele A1 – software download that allows students to simulate evolution of an allele in a population
• The Tree Thinking Challenge – two quizzes on tree thinking concepts. The first covers basic tree ideas and the second uses trees from real Science papers to pose more challenging questions.
• Understanding Evolutionary Trees – a great review paper about student misconceptions about phylogenetic trees