Samara dispersal in boxelder: An exercise in hypothesis testing.
We present here a fun, inexpensive, and pedagogically useful laboratory exercise which involves indoor studies of the dispersal properties of the winged fruits (samaras) of boxelder (Acer negundo...

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A Simulated Pollination Exercise
It is generally not clear from general biology texts, or from popular videos on the subject,why certain flowers require a very specific animal to carry its pollen from one plant to another. This exer...

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Visualization of Mycorrhizal Fungi
A laboratory exercise that complements a lecture on mycorrhizae provides important reinforcement. Fortunately, it is relatively easy and inexpensive to stain only fungi (Phillips and Hayman, 1970) in...

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Using an Investigative Approach to a Laboratory Exercise on the Genetics of Indian Corn
Objectives 1. Understand Mendel’s first and second laws of inheritance. 2. Observe examples of Mendel’s monohybrid and dihybrid crosses and perform a chi-square test on his results. 3. Be able to ...

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Lights, Bean Plants, Action: Starch Printing, a Student Exercise
This exercise examines starch production in young bean leaves.

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The Botany Field Site (WWW): An Herbarium Project and A Guide through the Northeastern Deciduous Forest
This web site was created for freshman biology students to organize information and to foster work independent of the laboratory, such as tree identification in the autumn woods of Pennsylvania. Stude...

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Grafting Coleus Plants
This is an exercise I use with my non-science major botany students. Prior to doing this exercise we discuss the structure and function of the conducting tissues in plants. We compare the arrangement ...

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Photosynthesis/Respiration in Leaf Disks
I use this lab in a two-hour introductory majors’ course, Principles of Biology II, which covers cell and molecular biology, genetics, and evolution. Over the years I have discovered that students c...

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Keys, Kudzu and other Vines: The use of paper copiers to produce pictures of plants that students can be use in the production of a dichotomous key
This exercise was developed in an attempt to help students learn some basic botany (simple vs. compound leaves, opposite vs. alternate, etc.) and to use taxonomic keys in a more interactive way than ...

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Evolution of Plants from the Paleozoic to the Present
In an effort to present well-understood mechanisms of adaptation and selection in a simple format, we have developed an introductory laboratory script based on adaptive history and change in the pla...

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