Students in the introductory biological anthropology course at George Washington University attend semiweekly lectures covering a broad spectrum of the topics in the field. One of the strengths of our academic program is that in addition to lectures, students participate in weekly laboratory sections: smaller classes designed to give students hands-on experience with common materials and questions in biological anthropology. Labs cover a variety of topics from genetics to osteology to cognition to tools. The labs were designed and written by GWU faculty and graduate students to support introductory lectures, encourage interactive learning, and foster critical thinking.
We feel that these laboratory sections are a valuable part of the introductory course in biological anthropology. We note that at many universities, for various reasons, introductory courses cannot always include scheduled laboratory sections. We hope that, by making some interactive laboratory activities available for free online, we can assist instructors wishing to incorporate labs into their courses. Instructors can select from the labs and use one, a few, or many each semester. In order to make them as user-friendly as possible, the laboratories include instructions, answer keys, and a list of required materials.
If you are an instructor of biological anthropology and are interested in using these lab materials in your classroom, please check out the sample pages. We will add more labs in the near future to round out the collection. We hope that these labs will be a good resource for instructors wishing to incorporate more hands-on instruction into their classrooms!