Campbell Biology in Focus, 3rd Edition

Reach every student by pairing this text with Mastering Biology

Mastering™ is the teaching and learning platform that empowers you to reach every student. By combining trusted author content with digital tools developed to engage students and emulate the office-hour experience, Mastering personalizes learning and improves results for each student. Built for, and directly tied to the text, Mastering Biology enables an extension of learning allowing students a platform to practice, learn, and apply outside of the classroom.  Learn more about Mastering Biology.

Build visual skills to increase visual literacy and understanding

• New - Figure Walkthroughs guide students through key figures with narrated explanations, figure markups, and questions that reinforce important points. Questions embedded in each Figure Walkthrough encourage students to be active participants in their learning.
• Visualizing Figures help guide students to a deeper understanding of the ways in which figures represent biological structures, processes, and functions in one- to two-page visual spreads.
• Visualizing questions ask students to create visuals themselves and appear in every chapter.
• Inquiry Figures highlight how researchers designed an experiment, interpreted their results, and drew conclusions.

Build key scientific skills students need for biology using real data

• Problem-Solving Exercises challenge students to apply scientific skills and interpret data in solving real-world problems. These exercises are designed to maximize student engagement through compelling case studies, provide practice with data analysis skills, and highlight the interrelationship and interdependence of topics across introductory biology.
• Scientific Skills Exercises use real data to build key skills students need for biology, including data analysis, graphing, experimental design, and math skills and appear in every chapter of the text . Each Scientific Skills Exercise is also available as an automatically graded assignment in MasteringBiology with answer-specific feedback for students.
• Interpret the Data questions throughout the text ask students to analyze a graph, figure, or table and can be assigned in MasteringBiology.

Help students see conceptual connections throughout biology

• Make Connections Figures pull together content from different chapters and provide a visual representation of “big picture” relationships.
• Make Connections Questions ask students to relate content in a chapter to material presented earlier in the course to help them see how the different areas of biology are connected, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems.
• Make Connections Tutorials connect content from two different chapters using art from the book. These are assignablein MasteringBiology.

Reach every student with Mastering

• New - Five Ready-to-Go Teaching Modules expand the number of modules designed to make use of teaching tools before, during, and after class, including new ideas for in-class activities. The modules incorporate the best that the text, Mastering Biology, and Learning Catalytics have to offer and can be accessed through the Instructor Resources area of Mastering Biology.
• With Learning Catalytics, you’ll hear from every student when it matters most. You pose a variety of questions that help students recall ideas, apply concepts, and develop critical-thinking skills. Your students respond using their own smartphones, tablets, or laptops.  You can monitor responses with real-time analytics and find out what your students do – and don’t – understand. Then, you can adjust your teaching accordingly, and even facilitate peer-to-peer learning, helping students stay motivated and engaged. Instructors can create their own questions, draw from community content, or access the Learning Catalytics library of question clusters. Focused on key topics, the clusters consist of 2-5 questions about a single data set or scenario.
• New - Early Alerts in Mastering Biology help instructors know when students may be struggling early in the course. This insight enables instructors to provide personalized feedback and support at the moment students need it so they can stay–and succeed–in the course.

Empower each learner: Each student learns at a different pace. Personalized learning, including adaptive tools and wrong-answer feedback, pinpoints the precise areas where each student needs practice and gives all students the support they need – when and where they need it – to be successful.

• New - Figure Walkthroughs guide students through key figures with narrated explanations, figure markups, and questions that reinforce important points. Questions embedded in each Figure Walkthrough encourage students to be active participants in their learning.
• New - Visualizing Figure Tutorials guide students in practicing visual skills and include coaching feedback.
• New - Visualizing the Data coaching activities encourage students to practice their data interpretation skills.
• Updated - GraphIt! Coaching activities help students read, interpret, and create graphs that explore real environmental issues using real data. All 10 activities explore current topics such as the carbon footprint of food, fresh water availability, and ocean acidification in an entirely new mobile experience with accessible design.
• New - Pearson eText is a simple-to-use, mobile-optimized, personalized reading experience available within Mastering. It allows students to easily highlight, take notes, and review key vocabulary all in one place–even when offline. Seamlessly integrated videos and other rich media engage students and give them access to the help they need, when they need it. Pearson eText for Campbell Biology in Focus presents over 450 carefully chosen and edited videos and animations that bring biology to life. Resources include Get Ready for This Chapter questions, New Figure Walkthroughs, and HHMI Biointeractive videos and animations.

Deliver trusted content: We partner with highly respected authors to develop interactive content and course-specific resources that keep students on track and engaged.

• New - Galapagos Evolution Video Activities, filmed on the Galapagos Islands by Peter and Rosemary Grant, bring to life the dynamic evolutionary processes that impact Darwin’s finches on Daphne Major Island. Six videos explore important concepts and data from the Grants’ field research, with assignable activities.

• New - LabBench pre-lab materials provide the perfect combination of technique, content, and skill development to help your students move toward inquiry and understanding. These take students step-by-step through the concepts and techniques necessary to understand and conduct biological investigations, and ask them to make predictions, justify conclusions, evaluate data, apply mathematical techniques, and analyze the results of their investigation. Each section ends with formative assessment questions that test student comprehension and implement answer-specific feedback for each question.

• LabBench topics are:  Cellular Respiration, Biotechnology—Bacterial Transformation, Biotechnology—Restriction Enzyme Analysis of DNA, Energy Dynamics, Cell Division—Mitosis and Meiosis, Transpiration  Fruit Fly Behavior, Enzymes, Diffusion and Osmosis, Photosynthesis, Artificial Selection, Hardy-Weinberg Modeling, Blast and Phylogeny

• Evaluating Science in the Media coaching activities guide students through a step-by-step process for evaluating the authority, motivation, and reliability of online sources of scientific information.  Topics include genetically modified organisms, head injuries, tanning and skin cancer, and more.
• Scientific Thinking Activities help students develop an understanding of how scientific research is conducted. Topics include research questions such as “Can Scientists Use Gene Expression Data to Personalize Cancer Treatment?” and “Do the Microorganisms in Our Digestive Tract Play a Role in Obesity?”
• HHMI Short Films are documentary-quality movies from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that explore topics from the discovery of the double helix to evolution, with assignable questions.

Improve student results: When you teach with Mastering, student performance often improves. That’s why instructors have chosen Mastering for over 15 years, touching the lives of over 20 million students. Learn more in this learner success story.

Check out the preface for a complete list of features and what's new in this edition.