Guttman/Biology - Key Features

Key Features

The book incorporates several regular features to help pique students' interest and help them study.

The Art Program: I have attempted a closer integration of text with art by incorporating some drawings into the text. It was Johns's idea that this text art should be the equivalent of the simple drawings a good instructor continually makes on the blackboard while lecturing, although the illustrators have made far better pictures than most of us can sketch. The more elaborate numbered figures are the equivalent of the slides and transparencies we show during a lecture, and the publisher has gone all-out to create a new art program with real pedagogical value as well as the highest aesthetic qualities.

Some general themes of consistent formatting and color coding have been incorporated into the more conceptual figures. Thus, DNA is consistently blue and RNA consistently red. The parts of a eucaryotic cell have consistent colors, introduced on the general drawings in Chapter 6. Phospholipid bilayers are consistently blue and yellow. In physiological processes, hormones are consistently blue, other substances such as enzymes are green, organs and other structures are red-orange, conditions to be regulated are yellow-orange, and effects are violet. Below is an example of the consistency of color.

Key Concepts: The headings of sections are propositions that summarize key concepts, and these are listed at the beginning of each chapter.

Stories: Chapter 1 introduces the theme of science as story telling, and each chapter opens with a story to help put the subject into a context.

Boxed Readings: Three types of boxed readings are used as a kind of extended footnote. Concepts summarize ideas or introduce some necessary physical and chemical concepts. Methods discuss experimental methods. Sidebars tell interesting stories that are too good to pass up but don't fit into the text.

Exercises: Students can test their understanding of concepts by working through exercises that emphasize the skill of problem-solving. These exercises are interspersed in each chapter and take students beyond memorization by applying concepts to new situations.

Internal Index: To provide more information about a topic, perhaps as a reminder, an Internal Index running through the book gives references to more extensive explanations of concepts. In general I have tried to present only the information needed to grasp a point without burying the idea in unnecessary information.

Codas: I think of the chapters as tapestries of themes, analogous to pieces of music, so it is appropriate to conclude each chapter with a short coda that generally relates the subject to the major themes of the book.

Summary: Each chapter ends with summary statements that briefly recapitulate the principal ideas.

End-of-Chapter Review Questions: Students can test their understanding by answering these questions, almost all written by Gail Patt of Boston University. To properly answer the True-False questions, students must change a false statement to a true one, so they cannot simply guess T or F. The five concept questions in each chapter require students to state ideas in their own words. The answers to these questions are found in Appendix B.

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