Rebecca Price: Important Learning Gains from Genetic Drift and Bottlenecked Ferrets

IAS faculty member Becca Price wrote a guest blog for the SimBio website that talks to biology teachers about the challenges of teaching an evolutionary process called genetic drift. Drawing on a series of recently published studies, she shows that an easy-to-complete, fun, two-hour computer lab developed by SimBio called “The Genetic Drift and Bottlenecked Ferrets” does an excellent job of teaching genetic drift. She argues that the SimBio module is particularly effective because students use their understanding to make predictions about how experiments should turn out. If the experiments turn out differently, then they revise their understanding. Read the full post here.