Laboratory Manual for General Biology 5th Edition

Book Preface

Greetings from the authors! We’re happy that you are examining the results of our efforts to assist you and your students. We believe you’ll find the information below a valuable introduction to this laboratory manual.

Audience

This manual is designed for students at the college entry level and assumes that the student has no previous college biology or chemistry. The Lab Manual’s terminology and classification conform to that of Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life and to Starr’s Biology: Concepts and Applications, although you’ll find that the exercises support virtually any biology text used in an introductory course.

Features of This Edition
Inquiry Experiments and the Methods of Science
We realize that the best way to learn science is by doing science. Thus, in this edition, you will find numerous inquiry-oriented experiments. Some are extensions of a preceding activity, while others stand alone. Each follows the cognitive techniques whose foundations are laid in the first exercise, “Scientific Method.”

Throughout the manual, we place more emphasis on testing predictions generated from hypotheses.

We strongly believe that all biology students—both majors and nonmajors—benefit by repeating the logical thought processes of science.

New and Updated Exercises
As always, we strive to provide students with exciting, relevant activities and experiments that allow them to explore some of the rapidly developing areas of biological knowledge. We have added an additional animal diversity exercise and re-ordered and re-grouped some of the microbe, plant and invertebrate phyla.

Updated Taxonomy
An attempt to provide accurate systematic information is like trying to hit a moving target. As new information floods in, our best understanding of taxonomy and systematic relationships sometimes seems to change daily. The taxonomy in our exercises is completely updated and reflects the most widely accepted information at the time of publication.

What’s Important to Us
In preparing this lab manual, we paid particular attention to pedagogy, clarity of procedures and terminology, illustrations, and practicality of materials used.

Pedagogy

The exercises are written so the conscientious student can accomplish the objectives of each exercise with minimal input from an instructor. As suggested by the publisher, the procedure sections of the exercises are more detailed and step-by-step than in other manuals. Instructions follow a natural progression of thought so the instructor need not conduct every movement.

We attempted to make each portion of the exercise part of a continuous flow of thought. Thus, we do not wait until the post-lab questions to ask students to record conclusions when it is more appropriate to do so within the body of the procedure. Answers to in-lab questions are to be found in the Instructor’s Manual as well as online.

Terms required to accomplish objectives are boldface. Scientific names and precautionary statements, or those needing emphasis, are italic.

The use of scientific names is deemphasized when it is not relevant to understanding the subject. However, these names generally do appear in parentheses because the labels on many prepared microscope slides bear only the scientific name.