Rich Miesel has a nice paper soon to appear in Evolution: Education and Outreach which further explores ways to help students grasp tree-thinking in evolutionary biology. It’s the latest in a series of papers on this topic in E:EO and other journals and covers misconceptions that can’t be clarified too often.
Miesel, R.P. Teaching Tree-Thinking to Undergraduate Biology Students. Evolution: Education and Outreach, in press.
Other references:
Baum DA, Offner S. Phylogenies and tree-thinking. Am Biol Teach. 2008;70:222–9.
Baum DA, Smith SD, Donovan SS. Evolution: the tree-thinking challenge. Science. 2005;310:979–80.
Crisp MD, Cook LG. Do early branching lineages signify ancestral traits? Trends Ecol Evol. 2005;20:122–8.
Goldsmith DW. The great clade race: presenting cladistic thinking to biology majors & general science students. Am Biol Teach. 2003;65:679–82.
Gregory TR. Understanding evolutionary trees. Evo Edu Outreach. 2008;1:121–37.
Gregory TR. Understanding natural selection: essential concepts and common misconceptions. Evo Edu Outreach. 2009;2:156–75.
Halverson KL. Using pipe cleaners to bring the tree of life to life. Am Biol Teach. 2010;72:223–4.
Meir E, Perry J, Herron JC, Kingsolver J. College students’ misconceptions about evolutionary trees. Am Biol Teach. 2007;69:e71–6.
Novick L, Catley K, Funk D. Characters are key: the effect of synapomorphies on cladogram comprehension. Evo Edu Outreach, in press
O’Hara RJ. Population thinking and tree thinking in systematics. Zool Scr. 1997;26:323–9.
Omland KE, Cook LG, Crisp MD. Tree thinking for all biology: the problem with reading phylogenies as ladders of progress. BioEssays. 2008;30:854–67.
Perry J, Meir E, Herron JC, Maruca S, Stal D. Evaluating two approaches to helping college students understand evolutionary trees through diagramming tasks. CBE Life Sci Educ. 2008;7:193–201.
Sandvik H. Tree thinking cannot be taken for granted: challenges for teaching phylogenetics. Theory Biosci. 2008;127:45–51.
Smith JJ, Cheruvelil KS. Using inquiry and tree-thinking to “march through the animal phyla”: teaching introductory comparative biology in an evolutionary context. Evo Edu Outreach. 2009;2:429–44.
The Great Clade Race, at Evolution 2010 meeting in Portland back in March:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7230309@N05/4736830082/in/set-72157624363816280/
Michael D. Barton, FCD(Quote)
Nice article. The author’s name is Meisel.
JLT(Quote)