College biology instructors are experts in making biology relevant to their students. They integrate history, people, and context into their classroom presentations. They have opportunities to teach their classes front-page news. No college biology student has to learn biology in a vacuum, and even college biology majors should not be expected to make all the connections between what they are studying and the improvement of our daily lives entirely on their own.
How to make Biology Lessons and Experiments Interesting for Students?
The challenge of teaching introductory college biology is ensuring comprehensive inclusion of scientific content while maintaining intense student interest. Gifted instructors strategically embed social context into topics that appear multiple times in multiple advanced biology courses, and experiments from Modern Biology Inc. give them study guides, lesson plans, and test materials to ensure retention of important facts. In this article, we will give three comprehensive examples of our experiments and corresponding lesson plans for teaching.
Let’s start with an inescapable biology concept, the genome.
College students come to their introductory biology classes with varying degrees of preparation. Essentially all students will have some concept of DNA as a long, helical molecule, but they wouldn’t have a clue about how it could be observed. Students who need a brief remedial lesson can benefit from the addition of the Modern Biology Inc. Properties of DNA unit to their first lab in the week DNA is the lecture topic. College instructors seeking to tailor the presentation to quick catch-up on the topic can adapt materials from NGSS, such as their DNA Extraction Lab Lesson Plan. and their DNA Lab Student Handout and the DNA Lab Teacher Prep Notes. NGSS is a great source of adaptable lesson plans and study notes for basic biology.
Electrophoreses: Meaning and Definition
But no college biology class should stop there.
When your students are ready for a visceral experience of DNA analysis, they should begin with electrophoresis. Students for whom English is a foreign language benefit from study notes for electrophoresis emphasizing vocabulary. Materials available from the Internet read before the lab session can save everyone time. Loading a well with agarose gel, for instance, is a fundamental lab skill for this experimental activity. And your experiment package from Modern Biology Inc. will include a student manual and an instruction manual.
You can expand your students’ experience of DNA with our complete packages — with labware, reagents, test materials, instructor guide, and student guide with study notes — for:
- Structure, Function, and Isolation of DNA.
- Chromatographic Separation of Proteins.
- Cloning a DNA Segment.
- Restriction Nuclease Mapping of DNA.
- Tissue Printing.
- Characterization of the Satellite DNA from the Meal Worm.
- Introduction to Molecular Biology.
Modern and Basic Principles of Biology: What you need to know
Modern Biology Inc. provides you with experiments, not demonstrations. We make sure that the principles of scientific investigation are integrated into every product we sell.
Even college biology students may need to overcome some of their suppositions about basic principles of biology. Students have known since they were children that plants come from seeds. They know that plants make carbohydrates by photosynthesis. But they may not, even in college, have an intuitive grasp of cell division as the way plants grow.
Our experiment’s Effects of Temperature on Cell Respiration gives students a 3-D experience of how germinating seeds that have not yet developed cotyledons consume O2, not CO2. They will use respirometers to measure the consumption of oxygen and the release of diatomic hydrogen by the germinating seed.
Instructors can always refer to the basic curriculum for a pre-college Seed Germination Lab or the Structure and Function of Seeds or The Effects of Light and Heat on the Growth and Development of Plants for students who need extra help, but everything college biology teachers need for this unit is included in the Modern Biology Inc. kit.
Modern Biology Inc. also provides a lab package for Extraction and Analysis of an Enzyme from Wheat and Characterizations of Peroxidases in Plants.
Social Context Analysis in Biology Teaching: How to go about it?
Another important task in teaching introductory college biology is providing the social context that illuminates the importance of recent developments in biology.
Consider our experiment on sickle cell anemia, for example. In this exercise, your student will use agarose electrophoresis to test for variants of the sickle cell gene in samples of their own blood.
This experiment illustrates concepts of genetics, evolution, physiology, and biochemistry that students continuing their study of biology will encounter again and again. It illustrates relationships of genotype and phenotype, balanced polymorphisms, developmental gene regulation, cooperative binding, and protein polymerization.
But our laboratory exercise on sickle cell anemia also can be used to teach the social context of biological science/ It helps students understand the importance of biology for the real world.
We didn’t choose the topics for your experiment kits randomly. We included selected experiments that not only tie into critical TEM issues, but that is also endorsed in the literature of science education.
The Bottom Line:
Modern Biology Inc. empowers college biology teachers to integrate an understanding of social context with laboratory experiences. We empower college biology instructors to teach the concepts that their students need to progress in life sciences careers.
Over 500,000 students learn biology with the help of Modern Biology Inc. products every year. Over 8000 teachers use Modern Biology Inc.’s experiments and full-length courses. We want to encourage you to give our products a test run. We want to show you why thousands of teachers trust Modern Biology Inc.
Read Also:
