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Active learning exercises are an important component of the learning pathway and provide students with hands-on exploration of challenging topics and misconceptions. The second edition of Biology: How Life Works includes a new collection of over 40 in-class activities crafted to address the concepts that students find most challenging.

The activities collection was designed to cover a range of classroom sizes and complexity levels, and many can be easily adapted to suit the available time and preferred teaching style. Each activity includes a detailed activity guide for instructors. The activity guide introduces the activity, outlines learning objectives, and provides guidance on how to implement and customize the activity.

Many of the assessment questions and activities throughout How Life Works incorporate experimental thinking and data analysis. In addition, two activity types round out the assessment collection by providing applied practice with the data sets and examples from the text. Through Working with Data activities, students explore and analyze the experiment from a How Do We Know? figure from the text. Mirror Experiment activities introduce students to a new scientific study that relates to, or “mirrors,” one of the How Do We Know? experiments and ask them to apply what they have learned about data analysis to this new scenario.