With its distinctive investigative approach to learning, this effective laboratory manual encourages students to become detectives of science. While teaching the basic materials and procedures important for all biology majors to learn, the authors also invite students to pose hypotheses, make predictions, conduct open-ended experiments, collect data, and then apply the results to new problems. The result of this “process of science” approach is that students learn to think creatively, just as scientists do. Laboratory exercises are divided into 3 categories—directed investigations, thematic investigations, and open-ended investigations.