Business-as-usual students who completed the phylogenetics laboratory gained only on some tree-thinking skills, with no increase on polytomy, inference, or subsets of the ToL¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2016 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Students in the business-as-usual condition showed significant overall gain but no increase in performance on the evolutionary relationship: polytomy, inference, and subsets of the ToL skills. → Laura R. Novick and Kefyn M. Catley 2016

Evidence¶

Laura R. Novick and Kefyn M. Catley 2016¶

Laura R. Novick and Kefyn M. Catley. (2016). Fostering 21st-Century Evolutionary Reasoning: Teaching Tree Thinking to Introductory Biology Students. CBE—Life Sciences Education 15:ar66. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.15-06-0127

q2 · i? · causal · r2

Authors' interpretation of the Table 5 results for the business-as-usual condition, which received the 3-hour phylogenetics laboratory plus a small amount of lecture instruction. The lab defined polytomy but gave no instruction in assessing relatedness in such structures, and did not cover the ToL subsets skill.

"these students showed no increase in performance on the evolution- ary relationship: polytomy; inference; and subsets of the ToL skills."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Students reify visually depicted cladogram relationships, and understanding cladograms as subsets of the complete Tree of Life may be the fundamental difficulty in acquiring tree-thinking expertise — related
• A research-based tree-thinking curriculum produced significantly larger pretest-to-posttest gains than business-as-usual instruction in introductory biology — related
• Tree-thinking gains from the experimental curriculum were retained on an unannounced closed-book posttest given 5–6 weeks after primary instruction — related