Three Presbyterian College professors have published an article that will appear in the August issue of American Biology Teacher.

Dr. Troy Nash, professor of biology; Dr. Suann Yang, assistant professor of biology, and Dr. John Inman, professor emeritus of biology, wrote the article titled, “Growing a Thicker Skin: An Exercise for Measuring Organismal Adaptations to Terrestrial Habitats.”

The article is based on and describes new curriculum used by the professors in their introductory biology courses. The professors explained that the new curriculum came out of a need to create an alternative to the observation based lab exercises often used to cover animal and plant evolution when transitioning from water to land based habitats.

Unlike many labs that teach plant and animal evolution as a series of distinctly separate sequential topics, the activity proposed in the article considers the evolution as an integrated phenomenon in which evolution among plants and animals is occurring at the same time.

The activity is designed to take place in a single three-hour lab session, and it was designed to model the process of scientific inquiry and to require students to collect and analyze quantitative data.

For more information visit https://www.presby.edu/biology.