Ebook: Biology

With the new 11th edition, Raven and Johnson’s Biology continues the momentum built over the last three editions. This edition provides an unmatched comprehensive text fully integrated with a continually evolving, state-of-the-art digital environment. We have used this digital environment in the revision of Biology. The McGraw-Hill SmartBook© for the 10th edition provided data on student responses, and thus identify material that students find difficult. This “heat-mapping” technology is unique in the industry, and allows us to direct editing to difficult areas, or problem areas for students. The text continues to be a leader with an organization that emphasizes important biological concepts, while keeping the student engaged with learning outcomes that allow assessment of progress in understanding these concepts. An inquiry-based approach with robust, adaptive tools for discovery and assessment in both text and digital resources provides the intellectual challenge needed to promote student critical thinking and ensure academic success. A major strength of both text and digital resources is assessment across multiple levels of Bloom’s taxonomy that develops criticalthinking and problem-solving skills in addition to comprehensive factual knowledge. McGraw-Hill’s Connect® platform offers a powerful suite of online tools that are linked to the text and now include new quantitative assessment tools. The adaptive learning system helps students learn faster, study efficiently, and retain more knowledge of key concepts.

The 11th edition continues our tradition of providing the student with clear learning paths that emphasize data analysis and quantitative reasoning. Additional embedded eBook resources link to asides that delve more deeply into quantitative aspects.

As a team, we continually strive to improve the text by integrating the latest cognitive and best practices research with methods that are known to positively affect learning. We have multiple features that are focused on scientific inquiry, including an increased quantitative emphasis in the Scientific Thinking figures. We continue to use the concise, accessible, and engaging writing style of past editions while maintaining the clear emphasis on evolution and scientific inquiry that have made this a leading textbook of choice for majors biology students. Our emphasis on evolution combined with integrated cell and molecular biology and genomics offers our readers a student-friendly text that is modern and well balanced.

The 11th edition continues to employ the aesthetically stunning art program that the Raven and Johnson Biology text is known for. Complex topics are represented clearly and succinctly, helping students to build the mental models needed to understanding biology.

Insights into the diversity of life that are provided by molecular tools have led to a continued updating of these topics in the 11th edition. The diversity unit reflects the most current research on eukaryotic phylogenies, blending molecular, morphological, and development viewpoints. The biotechnology and genomics chapters have been completely revised to reflect changes in these fast-moving areas of modern biology. These are just a few examples of the many changes in the 11th edition of Biology that provide students with scientifically accurate context, historical perspective, and relevant supporting details essential to a modern understanding of life science.

As the pace of scientific discovery continues to provide new insights into the foundation of life on Earth, our author team will continue to use every means possible to ensure students are as prepared as possible to engage in biological topics. Our goal now, as it has always been, is to ensure student success. To that end, we approached this revision differently. To help guide our revision for this 11th edition, we were able to incorporate student usage data and input, derived from thousands of our SmartBook® users. SmartBook “heat maps” provided a quick visual snapshot of chapter usage data and the relative difficulty students experienced in mastering the content. With these data, we were able to hone not only our text content but also the SmartBook probes.

■ If the data indicated that the subject was more difficult than other parts of the chapter, as evidenced by a high proportion of students responding incorrectly to the probes, we revised or reorganized the content to be as clear and illustrative as possible.

■ In other cases, if one or more of the SmartBook probes for a section was not as clear as it might be or did not appropriately reflect the content, we edited the probe, rather than the text.

Below is an example of one of the heat maps from Chapter 8. The color-coding in highlighted sections indicate the various levels of difficulty students experienced in learning the material; topics highlighted in red being the most challenging for students.

We’re excited about the 11th edition of this quality textbook providing a learning path for a new generation of students. All of us have extensive experience teaching undergraduate biology, and we’ve used this knowledge as a guide in producing a text that is up to date, beautifully illustrated, and pedagogically sound for the student. We’ve also worked to provide clear explicit learning outcomes, and more closely integrate the text with its media support materials to provide instructors with an excellent complement to their teaching.