Dataset Information

Undergraduates Learn Evolution Through Teaching Kindergartners About Blind Mexican Cavefish.

ABSTRACT: The development and implementation of a scientific outreach activity comes with a number of challenges. A successful outreach event must match the sophistication of content to the audience, be engaging, expand the knowledge base for participants, and be inclusive for a diverse audience. Ideally, a successful event will also convey the importance of scientific outreach for future scientists and citizens. In this paper, we present a simple, hands-on guide to a scientific outreach event targeted to kindergarten learners. This activity also pursued a second goal: the inclusion of undergraduate students in the development and delivery of the event. We provided a detailed set of four activities, focusing on the blind Mexican cavefish, which were enthusiastically received by kindergarten audiences. The engagement of undergraduate students in the development of this activity encouraged public outreach involvement and fostered new scientific and communication skills. The format of the outreach event we describe is flexible. We provide a set of guidelines and suggestions for adapting this approach to other biological topics. The activity and approach we describe enables the implementation of effective scientific outreach, using active learning approaches, which benefits both elementary school learners and undergraduate students.

SUBMITTER: Gross JB

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5604892 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Undergraduates Learn Evolution Through Teaching Kindergartners About Blind Mexican Cavefish.

Gross Joshua B JB Gangidine Andrew A Schafer Rachel E RE

CourseSource 20160111

The development and implementation of a scientific outreach activity comes with a number of challenges. A successful outreach event must match the sophistication of content to the audience, be engaging, expand the knowledge base for participants, and be inclusive for a diverse audience. Ideally, a successful event will also convey the importance of scientific outreach for future scientists and citizens. In this paper, we present a simple, hands-on guide to a scientific outreach event targeted to ...[more]

PMID: 28936469

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundCave animals converge evolutionarily on a suite of troglomorphic traits, the best known of which are eyelessness and depigmentation. We studied 11 cave and 10 surface populations of Astyanax mexicanus in order to better understand the evolutionary origins of the cave forms, the basic genetic structuring of both cave and surface populations, and the degree to which present day migration among them affects their genetic divergence.ResultsTo assess the genetic structure within populations and the relationships among them we genotyped individuals at 26 microsatellite loci. We found that surface populations are similar to one another, despite their relatively large geographic separation, whereas the cave populations are better differentiated. The cave populations we studied span the full range of the cave forms in three separate geographic regions and have at least five separate evolutionary origins. Cave populations had lower genetic diversity than surface populations, correlated with their smaller effective population sizes, probably the result of food and space limitations. Some of the cave populations receive migrants from the surface and exchange migrants with one another, especially when geographically close. This admixture results in significant heterozygote deficiencies at numerous loci due to Wahlund effects. Cave populations receiving migrants from the surface contain small numbers of individuals that are intermediate in both phenotype and genotype, affirming at least limited gene flow from the surface.ConclusionsCave populations of this species are derived from two different surface stocks denoted "old" and "new." The old stock colonized caves at least three times independently while the new stock colonized caves at least twice independently. Thus, the similar cave phenotypes found in these caves are the result of repeated convergences. These phenotypic convergences have occurred in spite of gene flow from surface populations suggesting either strong natural or sexual selection for alleles responsible for the cave phenotype in the cave environment.

Dataset Information

Undergraduates Learn Evolution Through Teaching Kindergartners About Blind Mexican Cavefish.

Publications

Undergraduates Learn Evolution Through Teaching Kindergartners About Blind Mexican Cavefish.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets