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"not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, "that's treated as just normal science," says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or-most explosively-racial groupings."

"The frustrations teenagers experience with school are more a case of statistics and lack of experience than that of work ethic or "attitude" problems. These statistics are not tied to socioeconomic status, weight or time spent in a seat; they're genetic and experiential. We have a bell curve of abstraction and experience, and we're only beginning to think about how to honor that."

This semester (spring, 2013), I integrated my on-campus Duke University class (which I've taught twice before using a "traditional" lecture format) with my online class (which I'd taught once before via Coursera MOOC), both bearing the title "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution." My on-campus class had 453 students, while the online one peaked at 27,000 enrolled (though MOOC enrollment figures are misleading). Needless to say, I was more than slightly nervous about this experiment messing up, given the number of students who would be affected! My initial reaction is that the integration (via "flipped classroom") was a success and thoroughly enjoyable by me (I'll have to wait to see the formal course evaluations before I know how much most of the students liked it), but I learned some lessons for future iterations.

"Use of in-class concept questions with clickers can transform an instructor-centered "transmissionist" environment to a more learner-centered constructivist classroom. To compare the effectiveness of three different approaches using clickers, pairs of similar questions were used to monitor student understanding in majors' and nonmajors' genetics courses. After answering the first question individually, students participated in peer discussion only, listened to an instructor explanation only, or engaged in peer discussion followed by instructor explanation, before answering a second question individually. Our results show that the combination of peer discussion followed by instructor explanation improved average student performance substantially when compared with either alone. When gains in learning were analyzed for three ability groups of students (weak, medium, and strong, based on overall clicker performance), all groups benefited most from the combination approach, suggesting that peer discussion and instructor explanation are synergistic in helping students. However, this analysis also revealed that, for the nonmajors, the gains of weak performers using the combination approach were only slightly better than their gains using instructor explanation alone. In contrast, the strong performers in both courses were not helped by the instructor-only approach, emphasizing the importance of peer discussion, even among top-performing students."