Articles tagged Educational Resources
(12 results)

Guest post by Michele Markstein and Gregory Davis. A summary of the May 26, 2020 TAGC 2020 Online workshop, “Raising a Woke Generation of Geneticists: How and Why to Include Eugenics History in Genetics Classes.” In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minnesota police officers, the nation has been wrestling with how to identify and combat…

Guest post by Erin Vinson, University of Maine and Michelle Smith, Cornell University Are you teaching genetics and looking for some new ideas? Check out CourseSource, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes field-tested articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA. Many…

Guest post by Abha Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Natural Sciences at Minerva Schools at KGI. As on-campus meetings for laboratory courses are canceled, you might be wondering if you’ll be able to meet your goals in a virtual environment. It will take some adjustment, but it is doable if you are strategic about what you want…

Guest post by Cassidy Villeneuve, Wiki Education. A Wikipedia writing assignment is a great opportunity for instructors to teach science communication skills on a world stage. In this kind of assignment, genetics students create or improve Wikipedia articles related to course topics. They’re especially well equipped to translate scientific concepts this way for a general audience,…

Improving research mentor training requires new approaches. Mentoring is essential for the success of researchers at all career stages, but not all mentor-mentee relationships are created equal. Students from historically underrepresented backgrounds often receive less mentoring than their peers, and many mentors are not trained in how to mentor effectively. To address some of these…

Guest authors Sanjai Patel and Andreas Prokop explain why school biology lessons are important places to advocate fundamental biomedical research, and they present strategies developed by the Manchester Fly Facility to bring Drosophila research into primary and secondary classrooms. The need for fundamental biology research has perhaps never been greater than today, yet the conditions…

Guest post by Michelle Smith, Cornell University. Teaching genetics and looking for some new course ideas?  Check out CourseSource, which is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA. Here are some recent genetics articles: Meiosis: A…

Are you a postdoc looking for hands-on education experience and mentoring? Or a faculty member interested in bringing evidence-based, effective active learning strategies into your classroom? The PALM (Promoting Active Learning and Mentoring) network helps faculty and postdoctoral fellows gain hands-on experience and long-term mentorship in putting active learning strategies into practice. GSA is proud…

Phil Hieter, former GSA President and a Co-Chair for The Allied Genetics Conference, works at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, where Dave Ng directs the Michael Smith Laboratories Teaching Facility, AMBL. Dave developed a popular card game, Phylo, as a method to teach people about biodiversity, and Phil had an idea—what…

Finals are over, grades are turned in, and winter break is finally here! For better or worse, however, many people use “breaks” to catch up on all the things that have stacked up during the fall. If your idea of relaxation includes thinking about your next course (after all, advanced preparation can be a big…

If you’re doing it right, teaching undergraduates is incredibly difficult. Delving into the scholarship of teaching and learning can be absolutely overwhelming, especially if the principles of Vision & Change are new to you. Preparing excellent activities, making sure that students are engaged, redesigning a course so that it’s “flipped”- all of these things take…