This year has been a very exciting and busy year for all of us involved in TIEE. We added two editors to help with the growing volume of submissions. Kathy Winnet-Murray and Chris Beck have done outstanding work on this volume and we are very happy to include them in this expanded capacity.

With Volume 4 we are able to considerably broaden the variety of Experiments, which we have re-organized into three subsections: Field, Laboratory, and Simulation/Game. In addition, we include a new more streamlined type of Issues Figure Set that focuses on a single paper. We welcome comments on this change.

The evaluation of TIEE was completed this year by our evaluator, Deborah Morris. We were very pleased with the findings and inspired by suggestions for improvement and future directions. For example, over 75% of survey respondents (N=59) adapted TIEE materials for their courses and 30-50% used TIEE as a model for change of their teaching. In addition, over 60% of those surveyed said that publishing in TIEE would be valued in reappointment or tenure decisions (D'Avanzo et al. 2006).

In addition, the TIEE website continues to receive over 20,000 hits per month, and the pool of registered TIEE faculty users in our database now spans 20 countries worldwide. Since this is the last year of our NSF funding, we hope to be able to continue into the foreseeable future; however, a project such as this one needs community support. If you have not logged in and registered, please do so. With more submissions in the pipeline and more volumes planned for the future, we need to expand the pools of reviewers and authors, so please register and get involved.

During the last year, we began working with a team of 15 "research practitioners" who are doing research on their own teaching. As we explain in "Evaluation & Research on the Effectiveness of TIEE," Handelsman et al. (2004) and others have emphasized the need for "scientific teaching" — the application of scientific research methodology by faculty to their own teaching. Future plans for TIEE include expansion of this scientific research component and we will also be exploring the publication of results from this research in a new journal of ecological education within TIEE.

We continue to be very grateful for the expertise and considerable time given to this community effort by the TIEE authors, reviewers, and editors. We warmly thank all of our authors and reviewers for their high quality, thorough, and lightning turn-arounds of reviews and revisions. If you have suggestions or comments, we welcome your involvement and input.

TIEE is sponsored by the ESA who hosts TIEE on their website, sponsors TIEE workshops at annual meetings, and gives us invaluable advice. We also thank the Division of Undergraduate Education at NSF for supporting development of the site and CD-ROM (NSF DUE #0443714, #0127388, #0085840, and #9952347).

Thank you all for your support,

Charlene D'Avanzo and Bruce W. Grant

• D'Avanzo C, BW Grant, D Morris, S Musante, J Taylor, J Riney, and D Udovic. 2006. Design and Evaluation of TIEE, a Peer-reviewed Electronic Teaching Resource. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, In Press.
• Handelsman J et al. 2004. Scientific teaching. Science 304: 521-522.