We are very excited to be publishing a third volume of TIEE contributions. We warmly thank all of our authors and reviewers for their high quality, thorough, and lightning turn-arounds of reviews and revisions. Volume 3 demonstrates a high level of ongoing support by scientists and educators for TIEE. We are very pleased to add three new LTER Data Sets from the Temperate Lakes, Arctic, and Konza LTER sites. In addition to a Frontiers Issue concerning fire ecology, there are four new Experiments. The collection continues to grow and diversify. Again, because TIEE evolved from the Education Section and the Education and Human Resources Committee of ESA and ecologists are authors, reviewers, and users, it is very much a community effort. In addition to submitting to TIEE, we ask for your suggestions and critiques (please email the TIEE Managing Editor at TIEEsubmissions@esa.org).

Our evaluation efforts to date suggest that TIEE is widely used and highly valued by ecology faculty. At the end of 2004, we received a supplement from NSF to work more closely with a small group of about a dozen ecology faculty, from diverse institutions, to better understand the effectiveness of TIEE in a wide range of settings and classrooms. These faculty will learn about and receive mentoring on basic tools for classroom evaluation, research, and other facets of “scientific teaching” (Handelsman et al. 2004). They will work with other ecology faculty as part of a research team, beginning with a workshop at the 2005 ESA meeting, to identify common goals and outcomes and to plan the study. They will then use some of the TIEE resources in one course during the 2005-2006 academic year and study the effects of TIEE on student learning, while communicating with each other electronically throughout the year. The team will share their findings in a poster session at the 2006 ESA annual meeting and contribute to the collective wisdom about inquiry-based, student active ecology teaching.

TIEE is sponsored by the ESA who hosts TIEE on their website, helps organize workshops at annual meetings, and give us invaluable advice. We also thank the Division of Undergraduate Education at NSF for supporting development of the site and CD-ROM (NSF DUE #0127388, #9952347, and #0085840).

Charlene D’Avanzo and Bruce W. Grant
April 2005