Frank R. Castelli

Georgia State University | GSU · Department of Biology

ABSTRACT Biology laboratory courses with hands-on activities faced many challenges when switched to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition back to in-person instruction presents an opportunity to redesign courses with greater student input. Undergraduates in an ∼350-student laboratory course were surveyed about their prefer...

Enrollment in courses taught remotely in higher education has been on the rise, with a recent surge in response to a global pandemic. While adapting this form of teaching, instructors familiar with traditional face-to-face methods are now met with a new set of challenges, including students not turning on their cameras during synchronous class meet...

Undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) are known to provide benefits to the students they teach, but there have been few studies examining how UTAs themselves benefit from the experience and how the graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) that they assist benefit. We have developed and are continually improving a teaching assistant program for underg...

Territoriality is an adaptive behavioral trait that is important for animal's fitness and there still remains much to learn about the proximate mechanisms underlying the development of territoriality. We speculate that the formation of a conditioned place preference (CPP), an increased time allocation to the environment where a rewarding experience...

Speciation provides a framework for classifying biodiversity on Earth and is a central concept in evolutionary biology. To help undergraduate students learn about speciation, we designed a student-centered lesson that uses active-learning techniques (e.g., clicker questions, small group work, and whole class discussion) and compares multiple specie...

Species comparisons indicate that scent-marking may differ as a function of mating system and co-housing with the opposite sex ("pairing"). We previously demonstrated that pairing may decrease male solicitation to unfamiliar females in the monogamous Peromyscus californicus but not in the non-monogamous P. leucopus. Whether urine scent-marking of f...

Pair-bonded males often make substantial contributions to the care of their offspring. Male parental behavior may be affected by a range of factors, including previous experience (parental or alloparental), genetic influences, and contributions by the female partner. Previous studies have shown that a microsatellite polymorphism in the regulatory r...

In socially monogamous mammals, male behaviour can have important consequences on production and survival of offspring. Therefore, females in these species could enhance their reproductive success by discriminating among potential male social partners and mates on the basis of phenotypic cues correlated with male fidelity and paternal behaviour. Pr...