A New Approach to Introductory College Biology

这是一个计划，以改善和现代化的交付和内容的一个大招生入门级生物学课程。我们计划采用工作室的方式来讲授这门课程：80名学生将以2或4人为一组，由教师和研究生指导学习过程。取代传统的正式讲座/实验室模式，学生将从计算机文本、演示、模拟和动手实验中获得信息。该工作室强调小组工作和学生驱动的学习。为了使通识课程与学生更相关，我们计划按专业和/或共同兴趣将他们分成工作室部分。我们的假设是，目标相似的学生之间的互动和对相关例子的关注相结合，将提高我们课程的学习和记忆。这对女性、非传统学生和少数族裔来说尤其如此。在其他一些将工作室形式引入基础科学课程的机构中，初步研究表明，那些以工作室形式学习第一门课程的学生在后来更高级的课程中表现更好。我们将以几种方式传播我们项目的成果：1)由于课程材料将放在万维网上，因此可以在许多地方访问。2)我们将准备一份手稿提交给教育期刊，描述我们的结果。3)我们将参加区域和国家教育会议，展示我们的模型并报告我们的发现。

This is a plan to improve and modernize the delivery and content of a large-enrollment introductory level biology course. We plan to adopt a studio approach to delivery of this course: sections of eighty students will work in teams of two or four with faculty and graduate students guiding the learning process. In place of the traditional formal lecture/laboratory model, the students will receive information from computer text, demonstrations, simulations, and hands-on experimentation. The studio stresses group work and student-driven learning. To make the general course more relevant to students, we plan to group them into studio sections by major and/or common interests. It is our hypothesis that the combination of interaction between students with similar goals and focus on relevant examples will improve learning and retention in our course. This may be particularly true for women, non-traditional students, and minorities. At other institutions where studio formats have been introduced into basic science courses, preliminary studies indicate improved performance in later, more advanced courses among those students who have taken the first course in studio form. We will disseminate the results of our project in several ways: 1 ) because course material will be placed on the World-Wide Web, it will be accessible at many locations. 2) We will prepare a manuscript for submission to educational journals describing our results. 3) We will attend regional and national educational meetings and present our model and report our findings.