Biology 12th Edition

Book Preface

Goals of the Twelfth Edition

The mission of Dr. Sylvia Mader’s text, Biology, has always been to give students an understanding of biological concepts and a working knowledge of the scientific process. However, like the world around us, the process of teaching science is changing rapidly. Increasingly, instructors are being asked to engage their students by making content more relevant, while still providing students with a firm foundation in those core principles on which biology is founded. These changes are clearly outlined in the AAAS/NSF report, Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (2009). The eleventh edition of Biology was one of the first texts to address the principles of Vision and Change by integrating themes within the text. In this edition we expand on that effort with the development of a number of new resources and processes.

In addition to the evolution of the introductory biology curriculum, students and instructors are increasingly requesting digital resources to utilize as learning resources. McGraw-Hill Education has long been an innovator in the development of digital resources, and the Biology text, and its authors, are at the forefront of the integration of these technologies into the science classroom.

In this edition, the authors focused on the following areas:

1. utilization of the data from the LearnSmart adaptive learning platforms to identify content areas within the text that students demonstrated difficulty in mastering,
2. further development of the themes that connect the content of the text across multiple chapters,
3. development of a new series of videos and websites to introduce relevancy and engage students in the content,
4. refinement of digital assets to provide a more effective assessment of learning outcomes to enable instructors in the flipped, online, and hybrid teaching environments.

Relevancy

The use of real world examples to demonstrate the importance of biology in the lives of students is a key component of Vision and Change and an effective teaching strategy for introductory biology. The development of relevancy-based resources is a major focus for the authors of the Mader series of texts. Some examples include:

• A series of new chapter openers to introduce relevancy to the chapter. The authors chose topics that would be of interest to a nonscience major, and represent what would typically be found on a major news source.
• The development of new relevancy-based videos, BioNow Sessions, that offer relevant, applied classroom resources to allow students to feel that they can actually do and learn biology themselves. For more on these, see page ix.
• A new website, RicochetScience.com that provides updates on news and stories that are interesting to nonscience majors. The Biology101 project links these resources to the major topics of the text. The site also features videos to assist the students in recognizing the relevancy of what they are learning in the classroom.

The Vision and Change document clearly identifies the need to integrate core concepts throughout the curriculum. We recognize that scientific literacy is not based upon thememorization of a series of facts. Instead, learning is based on establishing associations and links between what, at first glance, appear to be diverse topics. The main themes we have chosen to emphasize include:

• Evolution
• Nature of Science
• Biological Systems

These themes are integrated into all aspects of the textbook, from the unit learning outcomes to the theme-based feature readings in the text. At the start of each chapter, “Following the Themes” introduces the relationship of the chapter’s content to each of the themes. At the end of each chapter, “Connecting the Concepts with the Themes” not only reminds the student of the relationships between chapter content and the three core themes, but also acts as a prelude to topics in the next few chapters of the text. In essence, the themes act as the threads that unite the concepts throughout the text, enabling the student to see relationships from the molecular to ecosystem levels of biology.