Evolution in Action, a Case Study Based Advanced Biology Class at Spelman College

Abstract

The Biology department at Spelman, a historically black women’s college has undertaken a major curriculum revision in the last few years. A primary goal of this revision is to in-crease the breadth of topics in biology classes. Historically, classes in the areas of ecolo-gy and evolution have been underrepresented whereas Spelman has always offered clas-ses in the areas of organismal, molecular, and cellular biology. As a part of this curricu-lum change, I developed the very first Evolutionary Biology class at Spelman. To max-imize student interest in evolutionary biology, I attempted to tailor the class to the student population at Spelman. Specifically, because the majority of Spelman students aspire to be health professionals, the course was designed to teach concepts in evolutionary biolo-gy using emerging infectious disease as case studies. I surveyed three parameters to gauge if this class was successful. First, I measured student interest in the various as-signments of this class. Second, I gave pre- and post- class tests to the students to meas-ure gains in course content knowledge. Third, I examined the data from college adminis-tered student evaluations of this class. I found that 1) students showed a high appreciation for case study activities, 2) students ’ content knowledge improved significantly over the semester, and 3) students perceived their learning experiences in this case study based class to be dramatically better than in the traditional lecture based classes.

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