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Students will be able to:

• create criteria for evaluating information that is touted as scientific.
• apply those criteria to evaluate the claim that Prevagen® enhances memory.
• identify the misleading tactics used on the Prevagen® website and in their self-published reporting.
• decide whether to recommend taking Prevagen® and explain their decisions.

Each of these objectives are illustrated with a succinct slide presentation or other supplemental material available ahead of class time through the course administration system. Learners found it particularly helpful to have video clips that remind them of mathematical manipulations available (in the above example objective c). Students understand that foundational objectives tend to be the focus of the quiz (objectives a-d) and that others will be given more time to work on together in class (objectives e-g), but I don't specify this exactly to reduce temptation that 'gamers' take a shortcut that would impact their group work negatively later on. However, the assignment for a focused graded group activity is posted as well, so it is clear what we are working towards; if desired individuals could prepare ahead of the class.

Students will be able to:

• Describe various parameters of air quality that can negatively impact human health, list priority air pollutants, and interpret the EPA Air Quality Index as it relates to human health.
• Identify an air quality problem that varies on spatial and/or temporal scales that can be addressed using publicly available U.S. EPA air data.
• Collect appropriate U.S. EPA Airdata information needed to answer that/those questions, using the U.S. EPA Airdata website data mining tools.
• Analyze the data as needed to address or answer their question(s).
• Interpret data and draw conclusions regarding air quality levels and/or impacts on human and public health.
• Communicate results in the form of a scientific paper.

Students will:

• interpret the main conclusions and their supporting evidence in a primary research article.
• concisely communicate the significance of scientific findings to an educated nonspecialist audience.
• identify the components of a primary research article and the components of the "inverted pyramid" press release structure.
• identify the central figure in a primary research paper and describe its key finding.
• demonstrate an understanding of intellectual property by giving appropriate credit to other people's original work.

Students will be able to: Week 1-4: Fundamentals of Science and Biology

• List the major processes involved in scientific discovery
• List the different types of scientific studies and which types can establish causation
• Design experiments with appropriate controls
• Create and evaluate phylogenetic trees
• Define taxonomy and phylogeny and explain their relationship to each other
• Explain DNA sequence divergence and how it applies to evolutionary relationships and DNA barcoding

Week 5-6: Ecology

• Define and measure biodiversity and explain its importance
• Catalog organisms using the morphospecies concept
• Geographically map organisms using smartphones and an online mapping program
• Calculate metrics of species diversity using spreadsheet software
• Use spreadsheet software to quantify and graph biodiversity at forest edges vs. interiors
• Write a formal lab report

Week 7-11: Cellular and Molecular Biology

• Extract, amplify, visualize and sequence DNA using standard molecular techniques (PCR, gel electrophoresis, Sanger sequencing)
• Explain how DNA extraction, PCR, gel electrophoresis, and Sanger sequencing work at the molecular level

Week 12-13: Bioinformatics

• Trim and assemble raw DNA sequence data
• Taxonomically identify DNA sequences isolated from unknown organisms using BLAST
• Visualize sequence data relationships using sequence alignments and gene-based phylogenetic trees
• Map and report data in a publicly available online database
• Share data in a formal scientific poster

At the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the roles of light energy and carbon dioxide in photosynthetic organisms.
• Identify the effect of nutrients on the growth of photosynthetic organisms.
• Describe global cycles in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and how they relate to photosynthetic organisms.

• Students will identify cell structures when viewing an image or diagram of a cell.

• Students will define the function of eukaryotic organelles and structures, including describing the processes and conditions related to transmembrane transport

• Students will differentiate between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, plant and animal cells according to their structural organization.

Module 1

• Demonstrate basic skills in using the UCSC Genome Browser to navigate to a genomic region and to control the display settings for different evidence tracks.
• Explain the relationships among DNA, pre-mRNA, mRNA, and protein.

Module 2

• Describe how a primary transcript (pre-mRNA) can be synthesized using a DNA molecule as the template.
• Explain the importance of the 5' and 3' regions of the gene for initiation and termination of transcription by RNA polymerase II.
• Identify the beginning and the end of a transcript using the capabilities of the genome browser.

Module 3

• Explain how the primary transcript generated by RNA polymerase II is processed to become a mature mRNA, using the sequence signals identified in Module 2.
• Use the genome browser to analyze the relationships among:
• pre-mRNA
• 5' capping
• 3' polyadenylation
• splicing
• mRNA

Module 4

• Identify splice donor and acceptor sites that are best supported by RNA-Seq data and TopHat splice junction predictions.
• Utilize the canonical splice donor and splice acceptor sequences to identify intron-exon boundaries.

Module 5

• Determine the codons for specific amino acids and identify reading frames by examining the Base Position track in the genome browser.
• Assemble exons to maintain the open reading frame (ORF) for a given gene.
• Define the phases of the splice donor and acceptor sites and describe how they impact the maintenance of the ORF.
• Identify the start and stop codons of an assembled ORF.

Module 6

• Demonstrate how alternative splicing of a gene can lead to different mRNAs.
• Show how alternative splicing can lead to the production of different polypeptides and result in drastic changes in phenotype.