Class Notes

Class Notes are presented for each chapter under its section.  Use the Class Notes to guide your reading in the textbook and study of online materials.  Included at the end of each Class Notes is a section called Lab which lists many of the important anatomical features to be learned in that chapter.

There is more information available to you in the book and on the website than is required for success in the course. The student will be tested based on these Class Notes.  Use the Class Notes to focus your studies as you move through the course.

You will find the Class Notes in the navigation bar on the left side of the web page, under "Section #".  I.e. the Class Notes for Chapter 1 are found in Section 1: Chapter 1. The Class Notes for Chapter 9 are in Midterm: Chapter 9; and for Chapter 15 are in Section 4: Chapter 15. 

Within each chapter, I have outlined the main learning objectives with text that is Bold face and underlined.  These are what I expect you to know for this course to achieve a grade of at least C.

In addition, you will see that I have included questions throughout each chapter in BLUE text. These questions are intended to reinforce concepts and learning. You will see the same questions over and over. 

Questions for Review

1. Which study skills in table I.1 do you need to improve?

2. Describe some ways you can avoid procrastination and keep on schedule.

3. List four learning styles. Which fits you best?

4. Describe the SQ3R study techniques.

5. What are ten steps in critical thinking?

6. Name (and describe) seven attributes or dispositions essential for critical thinking.

7. List some adverbs or adverbial phrases that introduce premises and conclusions.

8. Distinguish between an ad hominem attack and an appeal to ignorance.

9. Describe three questions you’d ask to evaluate the reliability of Internet information.

The Internet (or World Wide Web) offers a vast resource for students of environmental science. How can you find the information you need in this maze of information? Search engines offer an excellent way to find and filter the myriad sources on the Web. Probably you have already used at least one of these sources, but are you aware how many of these valuable tools are now available and how different they are?

Go to www.surffast.com/ to find an extensive list of search engines. Test the same term (perhaps global warming or biodiversity losses, for example) on a half dozen of them and compare how fast they respond, how many hits they find and what the differences are between the information they offer. Try some hierarchical search engines (those that organize information in categories) such as http://www.yahoo.com and http://www.lycos.com/. They often have annoying ads that slow your search, but they allow you to browse related themes and show you similar words or phrases that could be related to your topic.

Also try some meta-search engines such as www.dogpile.com/, www.Google.com/, or  http://www.profusion.com. These meta-engines examine other search engines to give you a much broader database. They also tend to find more resources. In a test to see what it would find on "global warming," Google searched 13 billion web pages and found 311,000 hits in 0.05 second. By contrast, Lycos found seven categories and 86 sites but took almost a minute to load. If you’re just starting your search, however, you may prefer to have fewer sites and more selectivity in finding useful ones. The Lycos Environment News, for instance, lets you browse current news stories and may reveal topics that you didn’t even know existed.

Many search engines allow you to type in a question in ordinary English: "Where can I find an article on global warming?" This may take you to places that you’d rather not go, however. The more specific and limited your query, the more likely you’ll be to get useful results. Some search engines allow you to use Boolean terms such as AND, OR, BUT NOT. If you enclose a phrase in quotation marks it will direct the search to that exact phrase including all the words in it. AND (in caps) will limit the search to both words (global AND warming), while OR (global OR warming) will find sources that have either word. The phrase, BUT NOT, excludes terms that you know you don’t want.

You’ll probably find that searching for the same words in different systems gives you very different results. When you’re doing research, it pays to use more than one search engine to make sure that you aren’t missing important perspectives and information.

Online Dictionaries

A good online dictionary is http://www.m-w.com, Merriam-Webster dictionary, and www.dictionary.com will direct you to specialized dictionaries including science dictionaries.