The universal appeal and pedagogical power of stories are well established, yet they are underutilized in biology classrooms. I suggest that stories have an important role in helping students understand how science is made, and in offering glimpses into the hearts and lives of scientists.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is a recently established discipline that connects evolutionary theory with developmental biology. However, despite evo-devo's integral use of diverse insect taxa as model systems and its interdisciplinary approach, current introductory entomology textbooks fail to fully integrate evo-devo into the undergraduate curriculum. We argue that an evo-devo case-study-based approach, focused on adult development, will not only familiarize students with exciting findings in this field, but will also help them deepen their understanding of basic entomological concepts. After a short background of the most important findings and methods currently used in evo-devo, we outline five case vignettes that span a variety of insect groups and entomological topics, including morphology and sexual selection.

Trees are the largest organisms students usually encounter in their daily lives. However, most are unaware of the critical roles trees play in their local environments. As critical components of green infrastructure, trees improve air quality, mitigate storm-water runoff, and provide food and habitat for other organisms. Using the cross-platform and open-source software Bioimages Collection Manager (BCM), we created an online interactive arboretum guide for a university campus arboretum. Faculty, students, and visitors can scan tree tags with their mobile devices and access biological metadata, participate in self-guided tree tours, and learn about the ecology and ethnobotany of individual tree species. Importantly, this approach may be replicated for other campuses, school yards, and additional green spaces.

The goal of this project was to determine the impact of supplementing a concurrent enrollment (CE; also called dual enrollment) nonmajors biology course with online mentoring from professional scientists via the PlantingScience (PS) program ( http://plantingscience.org). Student attitudes and motivation toward science were measured using the Test of Science-Related Attitudes (TOSRA) questionnaire as well as open-ended questions. Students in both the experimental group (CE biology course supplemented with PS) and the control group (CE biology course with no PS supplement) were surveyed during two academic years (2015–2017). The impact of PlantingScience on students' attitudes toward science is discussed.

Active learning increases performance in STEMcourses, but many instructors are hesitant to adopt active-learning practices because they are afraid students will have negative attitudes toward them. It was hypothesized that students whose first college biology experience was in a course that used active learning would have more positive attitudes toward active learning than students who initially experienced a traditional lecture-based course. Students in an introductory Cell Biology course were queried regarding their attitudes toward active-learning practices used in the class. Responses to a Likert-scale survey indicated that students had positive attitudes toward active learning, and an analysis of variance indicated that there were no significant differences between the attitudes of students who had previously taken a lecture-based biology course at the same institution, students who had previously taken a biology course at another institution, and students who were enrolled in Cell Biology as their first college biology experience (n = 52, P = 0.530). Students strongly favored active-learning techniques over passive techniques but were less convinced of their learning benefits. Experienced students indicated that they preferred the teaching methods used in Cell Biology over the techniques used in their prior biology course. The results indicate that in the context of a small classroom setting, most students have positive attitudes toward active learning regardless of their prior biology lecture experiences.

Inquiry-based investigations of diseases are often difficult to safely undertake in middle school or high school science courses. However, by utilizing potatoes as a mammalian analogue, important groups of pathogens can be investigated with common materials available from the local supermarket. This article provides information to guide the exploration of factors underlying the development of the potato disease bacterial soft rot, caused by Pectobacterium caratovorum, and allows students the freedom to develop and test their own hypotheses regarding the development of symptoms, the spread of pathogens, and the impact of host and environmental variables on the progress of disease.

“Investigating the Exposome: Vinyl Chloride Exposure, DNA Damage & Repair” is a data interpretation and graphing activity that provides students a relevant context in which to explore and refine what they know about DNA structure and function, mutation, DNA repair, and cancer formation. The activity utilizes published scientific data and invites students to assess the impact of exposure to vinyl chloride on DNA in an effort to introduce them to the concept of the exposome and engage them in this exciting field of scientific research.

We present a novel laboratory activity to introduce students to experimental approaches often used by biologists to study orientation in animals. We first provide an overview of the current understanding of magnetoreception – the ability of some organisms to sense magnetic fields. We then outline an exercise that uses common pill bugs (Armadillidium vulgare) to examine whether a pulsed magnetic field affects their directional preference. The first part of the experiment includes the construction and visual testing of a pulse magnetizer built using low-cost and easily obtainable materials. Afterward, students examine the orientation of pill bugs both before and after being subjected to a magnetic pulse. Finally, students analyze their results with circular statistics using the open-source R coding platform, providing them experience in coding languages and statistical analysis. The interdisciplinary and biophysical nature of this experiment engages students in concepts of electromagnetic induction, magnetism, animal behavior, and statistics.

Adapting research-driven routines to the classroom context can promote innovative and motivational learning environments. Using a case-study approach, we propose a set of bioinformatics-based activities supported by a tutorial video aiming to identify genes and disclosing their genomic context in different species. The rationale is to strengthen teachers' competencies to introduce bioinformatics resources and tools (e.g., NCBI, ORFinder, BLAST, and MaGe) in their teaching practices. By doing so, teachers will ultimately enhance students' understanding of how genomic data mining and comparative genomics are instrumental for biological research.