Reading Phylogenetic Trees: The Effects of Tree Orientation and Text Processing on Comprehension

This feature is designed to point CBE—Life Sciences Education readers to current articles of interest in life sciences educa-tion, as well as more general and noteworthy publications in education research. URLs are provided for the abstracts or full text of articles. For articles listed as “Abstract available,” full text may be accessible at the indicated URL for read-ers whose institutions subscribe to the corresponding jour-nal. This themed issue focuses on recent studies of concepts and conceptualization—from how textbook images and stu-dents ’ attitudes and levels of acceptance can influence their understandings to design of tools that educators can use to understand what their students know. 1. Novick LR, Stull AT, Catley KM (2012). Reading phyloge-netic trees: the effects of tree orientation and text processing on comprehension. BioScience 62, 757–764. [Abstract available: www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/bio.2012.62.8.8] Cladograms—branching, nested hierarchical diagrams drawn in a variety of formats—are commonly used to depict how organisms might be related. Although differently for-matted cladograms can convey the same information, infor-mationally equivalent cladograms are not necessarily equiv-alent “computationally, ” that is, with respect to the ease with which observers interpret and use them. Because di-agonal cladograms with a slanting up-to-the-right (UR) ori-entation are most commonly used in college-level textbooks, the authors explored whether a diagonal cladogram drawn with a UR backbone line is computationally equivalent to its informationally equivalent mirror-image, drawn in a slant-ing down-to-the-right (DR) orientation. Drawing from exist-ing studies on the influence of processing biases and prio