Extra credit - BI 325

Your extra credit paper should be double-spaced, 10 or 12 point font, and no more than 2 pages long.  The quality and thoughtfulness of your writing counts throughout.  You will need to do a very good job to get all 10 points.

Articles for extra credit.

I will post an article for you to read or you can find one yourself (after checking with Hooper).  Summaries are due on the last Friday of classes.  Here is the article:  Vilá et al. 2010.

Seminars for extra credit.

Seminar summaries are due one week after the seminar is presented.  You can either go to a seminar that I suggest in class or you can go to one that you find yourself, but be sure to check with me first to be sure it is appropriate for our class.

Grading. Here is how I will grade extra credit assignments that are summarizing an article or seminar:

1. Make sure you include who the author/speaker was and the title of the article/talk.

2. Summary - what are three main points of the article or talk and what evidence was presented to support them? (6 pts.) For research seminars or articles, you should include info on

a. Background - What biological system was being investigated? What were the big questions or problems addressed?

b. Hypotheses - What were the specific questions they were trying to test?

c. Conclusions - What were the main points the author(s) or speaker made? Were you convinced? Your critical thinking.

3. What are three ways that the seminar or article relates to ecological principles we discussed in class? You need to give a brief description of each that shows me you have a strong understanding of the concepts; just mentioning a couple of "keywords" is NOT sufficient. (3 pts.)

4. What did you personally learn from this? (1 pt.)

Total: 10 points.

Previous papers
Knight et al. (2005) Trophic Cascades Across Ecosystems. Nature 437: 880-883.