The Apprentice's Companion for General Biology

Designed to accompany General Biology, The Apprentice’s Companion for General Biology is an exciting and valuable new combination of experiment book, field manual, and commonplace book. Throughout the book, students are prompted to form hypotheses, take data, and revisit those hypotheses to assess, wherever possible, if they are supported by the data. Enhanced with images of art, poems, and quotes by respected scientists and naturalists, each chapter contains:

• multiple experiments and lab activities, some taking approximately 15 minutes and others occupying a class period or more
• experiment procedures
• space for sketches, draft and final graphs, and data and data tables
• room for writing down thoughts and interacting with questions

The use of everyday materials is maximized so that overall costs associated with the experiments are manageable. For example, in an experiment on osmosis, eggs (instead of the customary dialysis tubing) are used.

An accompanying downloadable PDF of teacher’s notes contains information about time requirements, supply substitutions, and preparing solutions. It also contains photos obtained during pilot runs of the experiments so that instructors unfamiliar with these experiments will know what to expect.