Reading Nature: Engaging Biology Students with Evidence from the Living World

By making room for this book in your curriculum, you’ll have a fresh way to motivate your students to look at the living world and ask not only “Why?” but also “How do we know?” Unique in both its structure and approach, Reading Nature is a supplemental resource that provides a window into science ideas and practices. You’ll find the book useful because it • Draws on carefully selected peer-reviewed articles so that students have an opportunity for text-based inquiry into scientific investigations. Each of these evidence-based texts ties into one of five disciplinary core ideas in the Next Generation Science Standards―from molecules to organisms, ecosystems, heredity, biological evolution, and human impacts on Earth systems. • Is organized to make the source material easy for students to grasp and for you to teach. Within each of the book’s five chapters, the authors have framed section headings as questions; highlighted the roles of people in the narrative; offered context and relevant data for the investigations; and provided supplementary teacher questions and prompts. • Can be adapted to your needs as an active tool for inquiry. You may use the various texts in the book to introduce a unit or an investigation or to pull ideas together before a summative assessment. The texts are also useful as extensions of existing ideas. Unlike traditional textbooks, Reading Nature makes it clear that biology is much more than dry facts and complicated vocabulary. It can help you prompt students to think deeply about the “endeavor of science” as it truly is―full of ingenious experiments, frustrating dead ends, and incredible finds that contribute to our understanding of the amazing phenomena of living things.