ICP for an Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program at Colorado College

科罗拉多学院建议加强一个新的跨学科环境科学项目的提供，在化学、地质、经济和生物系教授环境课程的现有设备中增加一台电感耦合等离子光谱仪(ICP)。多个系的教职员工开设了新课程，并改进了现有课程，以满足学生对环境科学教育的需求。为这些学生提供实质性课程的下一步是加强环境课程的量化分析部分。拟议的比较方案由于其多组分分析能力，在让学生参与开发和评估各种替代模型以及提供定量数据方面特别有效。化学、生物、地质学和经济学等环境课程的学生将使用该仪器分析空气和水中的元素污染物，以及植物和土壤中的营养物质和有毒金属。科罗拉多学院的教职员工强烈认为，科学应该作为实验室或实地体验来教授，在其中创建模型和理论来解释观察，最好的实验室教学体验包含原创研究的重要组成部分，使学生能够参与到科学实践中来。不仅学生为可能的教学、毕业或工业工作做好了准备，而且非理科专业的学生也接触到了科学家得出影响我们所有人生活的结论的过程。根据科罗拉多学院过去使用其他仪器的经验，我们预计国际比较方案将进一步加强各部门之间的互动，包括自然科学和社会科学之间的互动。

Colorado College proposes to strengthen offerings in a new interdisciplinary environmental science program by adding an inductively coupled plasma spectrometer (ICP) to the current equipment used to teach environmental courses in the chemistry, geology, economics, and biology departments. Faculty in a variety of departments have created new courses and improved existing courses to meet student demand for environmental science education. The next step in providing a substantive curriculum for these students is to strengthen the quantitative analysis components of environmental course offerings. The proposed ICP, because of its multicomponent analysis capabilities, is particularly effective for involving students in developing and evaluating various alternative models,as well as providing quantitative data. The ICP will be used by students in environmental courses in chemistry, biology, geology, and economics to analyze air and water for elemental pollutants, and plants and soils for nutrients and toxic metals, as well as investigate the bioaccumulation of heavy metals in food webs.Colorado College faculty believe strongly that the sciences should be taught as a laboratory or field experience in which models and theories are created to explain observations, and that the best laboratory teaching experiences contain a significant component of original research that allows students to become involved in the practice of science. Not only are students prepared for possible teaching, graduate, or industrial work, but non-science majors are exposed to the processes by which scientists arrive at the conclusions that impact all of our lives. Based on past experiences with other instruments at Colorado College we expect the ICP to further enhance the interaction between departments, both within the natural sciences and across to the social sciences.