GETTING PAST TERMINOLOGY IN AN INTRODUCTORY CLADISTICS LECTURE

Cladistics is an integral component of modern paleontology. However a beginning lecture on cladistic concepts, particularly to introductory level students, can be an ordeal for both the students and the instructor. Typical introductory cladistics lectures tend to be front-loaded with difficult terminology that can act as a barrier preventing students from grasping the underlying concepts. “The Great Clade Race” is a cooperative, interactive exercise that I have developed for use in introductory level paleontology, evolution, and general science courses that allows students to explore cladistic concepts without getting bogged down in terminology. It allows students to reconstruct the common history of a set of objects and essentially build a simple cladogram based a few elementary rules. Once students have discovered the basic rules of the game on their own, we can then work backwards as a class to define terms like “synapomorphy,” “symplesiomorphy,” and “homoplasy.” I have been using this exercise for a term and a half now and have been getting wonderful results. Not only are students performing better on quizzes and exams, but also they are demonstrating deeper thinking in the questions that are asking about cladistics. Instead of asking questions like “Can you explain one more time the difference between synapomorphy and symplesiomorphy?” students are now asking questions like “Is there a way that you can figure out how long the branches on the tree are?” and “Can the arrangement of characters on the cladogram tell you anything about why those characters evolved?” By putting the initial emphasis of the exercise on applications and explorations, instead of terminology and methodology, this exercise has significantly improved student understanding of a difficult topic.