As the days get cooler and autumn approaches, it's the perfect time for a fresh start. Back to school is here. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
As the days get cooler and autumn approaches, it’s the perfect time for a fresh start. Back to school is here. Whether your teen is heading off for another year at college or just beginning the transition, we’ve curated a selection of helpful guides to make the journey smoother. These titles are perfect companions for navigating this exciting new chapter.
Mastering the Transition to College: The Ultimate Guidebook for Parents of Teens With ADHD
Sending a teen off to college is a thrilling milestone, but for parents and caregivers of teens with ADHD, it can also bring unique challenges. Mastering the Transition to College is designed to ease those concerns by offering expert advice, practical strategies, and proven tools to help teens thrive both academically and emotionally during this transition.
College Mental Health 101: A Guide for Students, Parents, and Professionals
College Mental Health 101 offers more answers, relief, resources, and research backed information for families, students, and staff already at college or beginning the application process. With simple charts and facts, informal self-assessments, quick tips for students and those who support them, the book includes hundreds of voices addressing common concerns.
Learn more about College Mental Health 101 by Christopher Willard, Blaise Aguirre, and Chelsie Green
Supporting Your Teen’s Mental Health: Science-Based Parenting Strategies for Repairing Relationships and Helping Young People Thrive
Teen mental health issues are rising at an alarming rate, and many families are unsure of how to best help their children. Supporting Your Teen’s Mental Health is an essential resource for parents and caregivers looking to support teenagers who are struggling with mental health concerns. Written in a conversational tone by psychologist and fellow parent Andrea Temkin-Yu, the workbook is a thorough, evidence-based guide to essential parenting strategies that have been proven to help improve relationships and behavior.
If Your Adolescent Has Autism: An Essential Resource for Parents
While adolescence can be a tough time for parents and their teens, autistic teenagers may face specific challenges and need targeted support from the adults in their lives. The road ahead can be difficult for parents and caregivers, too, especially because the teenage years can involve surprising changes in their child and in society’s expectations of them.
The Parents’ Guide to Psychological First Aid: Helping Children and Adolescents Cope With Predictable Life Crises
Just as parents can expect their children to encounter physical bumps, bruises, and injuries along the road to adulthood, emotional distress is also an unavoidable part of growing up. The sources of this distress range from toddlerhood to young adulthood, from the frustration of toilet training to the uncertainty of leaving home for the first time.
Every September, caregivers and kids alike prepare for one big change: the start of a new school year. As the weeks of summer draw to a close, families are cramming in the last moments of summer fun while simultaneously gearing up for school drops offs and new classroom schedules. While it can be an incredibly exciting time, filled with first day of school outfits and new school gear, it can also be incredibly stressful. This can be particularly true for teenagers who, compared to younger kids, are facing higher academic demands and social pressure while experiencing the major physical and developmental changes that come during adolescence. On top of that, a 2023 Center of Disease Control report showed that teens of today have higher rates of mental health concerns, such as anxiety and depression, and that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are increasing. This can make the return to school daunting for teens, as well as parents who are worried about how their child will manage the transition and demands of the year.
Fortunately, there are several tools that parents and caregivers can use to prepare kids and teens for the first few weeks in September. This includes setting clear expectations, skills to encourage helpful behavior, and strategies that help kids feel supported by their parents.
Setting expectations
While many kids prefer to keep their heads in the sand when it comes to a new academic cycle, it can be incredibly helpful to set expectations for the school year a few weeks in advance. The most basic version of this includes outlining differences between summer versus school schedules, such as changes to sleep and wake times, limits to screens, or daily responsibilities. This preview can help kids’ brains prepare for the upcoming shifts in their daily lives and make the transition a little smoother. It’s also a great idea to talk to kids about how the upcoming school year might be different than the last one. This could include providing information on class size, the structure of the day, or increased expectations. The goal is not to scare your kids about everything coming their way, but rather to provide them with simple clear information in a manner that builds excitement. For example, “It’s so fun that you get to go to go off-campus for lunch this year. I bet it will make the day feel way more interesting!” Or, “I know high school is bigger than middle school. It may feel a little overwhelming, but it’s also such a great time for you to see how capable you are.”
Encouraging positive behaviors
Once expectations have been set, parents can also work to encourage brave or skillful behavior. This may include things like taking more responsibility (e.g., managing their own communication with teachers and coaches), growing outside of their comfort zone (e.g., joining a new club or social circle), or challenging themselves with new opportunities or roles (e.g., a first job or harder courseload). This most effective way to do this is through a skill called “labeled praise.”
Labeled praise is when you show appreciation for a specific behavior or characteristic your child is demonstrating. When it comes to a new school year, parents can look for opportunities to praise preparation, flexibility, and bravery. For example, “I know you really loved your teachers last year, and I appreciate how openminded you are about your new schedule.” Another parent may say, “Great call on getting to bed a little earlier this week. It’ll make the start of school so much easier!” For teens who haven’t mastered brave or skillful choices, parents can offer cheerleading and encouragement. Phrases like “I know you’re going to do a beautiful job making friends because you’ve done it before!” or “10th grade is tough, and I have total confidence that you’re going to find a way to balance everything” send a message that they really believe in their kid. This can go a long way towards encouraging positive behaviors.
Providing validation
When you do notice your child having a hard time, whether it’s nerves, low mood, or difficulty organizing themselves for a new semester, it’s always a great idea to offer validation. Validation is a skill used to show somebody that you can see their perspective or understand where they are coming from. Validation can be a tricky skill to master for caregivers because it is sometimes hard to put yourself in your child’s shoes, or you are eager to get them to see a new perspective. For example, when your child complains about their new math teacher who they have heard is a hard grader, it’s tempting to say “Nah! I’m sure it’ll be fine!” This may work for some kids. However, it can come off as dismissive and hard to believe for a teen whose anxiety or stress is high. Instead, try validation: “It makes sense that you’re nervous based on what you’ve heard!” While you aren’t agreeing with your child’s worries, you are acknowledging them, and that can help increase a sense of connection and communication. Once your child feels understood, they’ll be better able to think clearly about the situation and problem solve as needed.
As you navigate another year of permission slips, homework, and extracurricular activities, remember that you have a handful of tools in your pocket to help ease the way. With a little bit of preparation, encouragement, and support, you and child can start the school year off on a great foot.
Animals caring for their young, such as a lioness carrying her cub by their scruff or a matriarchal elephant herd nursing young calves, are the kinds of behavior that many would pay good money to watch on a safari. However, fish, especially father fish, caring for their young has received limited popular attention, except maybe for the clownfish father-son duo featured in Finding Nemo. Findings published in the recent article “Parental care drives the evolution of male reproductive accessory glands across ray-finned fishes” in the journal Evolution by a group of scientists in Canada shed new light on the evolution of fish paternal care. Lucas Eckert (McGill University), along with his co-advisors Ben Bolker and Sigal Balshine (both at McMaster University) and their co-authors Jessica Miller and John Fitzpatrick, show that, among ray-finned fish, species in which fathers look after young evolved reproductive accessory organs six times faster than those without male care.
Ray-finned fish, bony fish with webbed fins supported by thin, long rays of bone, represent the vast majority of known fish species. Some of these species have reproductive accessory organs, which are parts analogous to prostate glands in humans. These organs are not directly involved in producing gametes, but they optimize reproductive potential through functions such as sperm storage and nourishment. They also produce fluids that increase the ability of sperm to move and fertilize eggs. Research on how these glands evolved has focused mostly on mammals and insects, with little known about their evolution in fish.
“Accessory reproductive glands are a bit of a ‘mystery organ’ when it comes to fish”, says Dr. Sigal Balshine, fish behavioral ecologist and co-principal investigator of this study. “Some fish have them while some don’t have them at all. We know of their existence only in a very few species out of nearly 30,000 fish species in the world. Even when they are present, accessory reproductive glands show bizarre diversity which has always made me think that there must be interesting evolutionary drivers shaping them. There was a lot we didn’t know regarding how or when they evolved, which is why we started collecting data on them”.
In certain groups of animals, sperms of multiple males compete to fertilize the eggs of a single female, a scenario known as sperm competition. Accessory glands produce secretions that enhance sperm performance, and scientists have long believed that they evolved as a weapon to aid in this post-copulatory war in organisms such as rodents and insects. Most fish biologists assumed fish reproductive accessory glands followed the same evolutionary trend. However, in their study, Eckert and colleagues shift the focus away from sperm competition towards parental care. These authors reconstruct the evolutionary history of reproductive accessory organs, testing whether parental care and/or mate competition among males contributed to their evolution.
“There was evidence that these organs were super important in the species that have them, in securing reproductive success and fitness through a variety of functions. In that context, when some species have them and some don’t, the most obvious question was what were the drivers that selected for their evolution in the first place.” says Lucas Eckert, PhD student and lead author of the study, and one of the many students who have been collecting these data since 2017.
The team approaches this question using a quantitative synthesis of phylogenetic, morphological, and behavioral trait data of ray-finned fish collected from published databases. A plethora of published research data is available on reproductive traits of fishes, owing to their remarkable diversity in reproductive organs and behaviors. However, previous studies mostly only describe these traits, without formally testing any hypotheses regarding their evolution. In this study, the authors compile reproductive trait data for over 600 fish species from research conducted over many decades, to quantify the influence that sperm competition and parental care have had in shaping the accessory glands.
In this study, we have been able to put existing data and methods together in ways that they have not been connected before”, says Dr. Ben Bolker, mathematical biologist and co-principal investigator of the study. “This study has been able to find ways to ask the question and find, how much sperm competition and parental care contribute to the evolution of accessory reproductive organs of ray-finned fish, rather than ask what exactly caused accessory glands to evolve, because in biology everything does everything”.
Left: Upside-down round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) male guarding his eggs. Photo by Sina Zarini. Right: Simplified phylogeny highlighting the main ray-finned fish groups in which accessory glands are present (red branches). Illustration by Lucas Eckert.
The special benefits accessory glands provide male fish for improving their reproductive success explains why they evolved faster in species with paternal care. Unlike in many other animal groups where mothers take care of their young, when it comes to fish, that duty was most commonly delegated to fathers by evolution: they had the resources to maximize the survival of fertilized eggs, such as territory, security and nutrition. Accessory glands produce secretions that protect fertilized eggs against microbial infections and increase sperm adhesiveness and the viable period of sperm after release. These secretions allow these stay-at-home fish dads to multi-task in keeping their sperm viable for newly spawning females even while taking care of their young and defending their nests.
Though the evolution of accessory glands is traditionally thought to be driven by sperm competition, this study uncovers a new angle on drivers of fish accessory gland evolution by considering parental care behaviors. The authors hope that these results will encourage researchers to take a closer look at these mysterious glands and consider their potential importance in the species that possess them.
Featured image: Goby eggs by Olivier Dugornay, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
I often tell my students that biology has become a data-driven field. Certainly, there’s a general sense that methods related to biological sequences (that is methods in genomics and bioinformatics) have become very widespread. But what does that really mean?
To put a little flesh on those bones, I decided to look in detail at all the biology-related articles in a single issue of the journal Nature (issue 8069, the one that was current when I started). I’m focusing here on articles, representing novel peer reviewed research. By my count, 16 of the 26 papers in this issue are related to biology in one way or another. (Those 16 also include neuroscience and bio-engineering related papers).
For each of these articles I went through the methods looking for genomics and bioinformatics related approaches. I sorted what I found into a few categories. Here’s a short summary:
Four of the papers (25%) used high throughput DNA sequencing.
Four were doing phylogenetic reconstruction. (Two of these were doing both phylogenetic reconstruction and sequencing).
Four were doing RNA seq, that is high throughput sequencing of RNA to study gene expression.
Five used computational methods of sequence analysis (e.g. alignment or its derivatives).
My “other high throughput methods” category also contained five papers.
Considering all high throughput sequence-related methods together, I found that 10/16 papers fell into at least one of these categories. That is, just over 60% of biology papers in this issue were using one or another such method. Which is to say, these methods really are very common in modern research.
The papers in issue 8069 used these methods to study a huge diversity of questions. One paper used sequencing based approaches to better characterize variation in the pea plant studied by Gregor Mendel, using this to get insights into the basis of several of his traits (which had not previously been known). Another looked at deep phylogenetic relationships among eukaryotes. Still another compared patterns of methylation during development between eutherian and marsupial mammals. I could go on, but the message is that genomics and bioinformatics are used to answer many different kinds of questions.
The take-away is that these are foundational methods for modern biology. As such they should be basic training for any student interested in continuing with research in the biological sciences. This is not only so students can conduct research on their own, but also so they can understand papers they read in a deeper and more sophisticated way.
In our recent second edition of the book Concepts in Bioinformatics and Genomics, we try to balance biology, mathematics and programming, as well as build knowledge from the ground up. Topics range from RNA-Seq and genome-wide association studies to alignment and phylogenetic reconstruction. Our hope is that this approach will help students understand the research they encounter on a deeper level and prepare them to potentially participate in that enterprise.
The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone via computers, and in the last decade or so, via their handheld mobile device. The young people currently in university or in school grew up in a world where information is not privileged and immediate access to all of it is taken for granted. In this age of immediate and readily accessible information on any subject, we must ask: What is the role of academic institutions in teaching? If anyone can find out anything at any time, why learn anything? Is there any value to knowledge in its own right?
The answer is that of course teaching and learning are still important, but they must change to reflect the way information is accessed. The fact is that information on its own is useless without a contextual framework. It may be possible to easily find a detailed account of all of the units and commanders that participated in the Battle of Regensburg in 1809, but if the reader has no understanding of military history, and no background on the politics leading to the Napoleonic wars, this information is no different from a shopping list. Similarly, it may be possible to find detailed information on the excretory system of annelid worms, but without an understanding of what excretory systems are and what their role is in the organism, and without a knowledge of the biology and evolution of annelid worms, this information is no more than a list of incoherent technical terms.
These two very different examples serve to highlight the difference between information and knowledge. Possessing knowledge about a subject means being able to place information into a broad framework and context. People who are knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars do not necessarily know the names of every commander of every unit in the Battle of Regensburg, but if they need this information, they can access it and use it better than someone with no knowledge. A comparative zoologist may not know all the details about annelid excretory systems, but when needed, they will know what to look for.
With this distinction in mind, I suggest that teaching and textbooks need to shift their focus from transferring information to transferring knowledge. No textbook can compete with the wealth of information available at the students’ fingertips. No course can ever impart all that there is to know about a subject. However, a good teacher and a well-written textbook can provide a much better framework for knowledge and understanding than a search engine will ever be able to. Indeed, a course or module that overburdens the students with numerous bits of information is not only a misuse of resources, it is ultimately counter-productive, as the student will always be able to challenge the teacher with a new bit of information not included in the course.
Teaching in the age of information should focus on providing a working vocabulary of a subject and on building a robust framework of knowledge. Detailed examples can be used to demonstrate principles, but this should be done sparingly. The curious students can then fill in the details on their own, taking advantage of the information at their fingertips.
I have been following these principles in my teaching of evolution and organismic biology for as long as I have been a university professor. My frustration at the details-heavy zoology textbooks led me to write a new textbook, focusing on principles and on providing a conceptual framework to organismic biology, rather than on details. For example, I have written a chapter on excretory systems that outlines what the roles and functions of this system are, and gives a few demonstrative examples of how these functions are manifested in a small number of organisms. I have included similar chapters on other systems interspersed with chapters on individual animal phyla, which give an overview of the phylum and its diversity, and present the specific variations within each of the organ systems, and how these are adapted to the life history of members of the phylum.
As we and our students continue to have easier and more readily available access to information, this new approach will provide a more successful framework for students to continue to grow and learn as they step out into the world. Hopefully this approach will be picked up by authors of additional textbooks to provide a new generation of teaching resources, more suitable for the age of information.
