Reform of Undergraduate Biology Education: Biological Inquiry and Integrative Biology.

学院正在改革其生物学核心课程，以加强学生对生物学过程的学习，为入门学生提供真实的研究经验，为专业提供现代综合生物学，并增加跨学科研究的机会。生物学的迅速发展给教育工作者带来了挑战，他们必须在压倒性的、不断增长的信息量中教授清晰的生物学原理。应对这一挑战的一个有希望的方法是使用基于研究的学习，将生物学教学从作为事实的集合转向作为实际实践的生物学教学。与此同时，综合研究领域的增长表明，生物学的进步越来越依赖于跨学科的综合。我们建议在一个综合框架内结合广泛的研究性学习的入门课程。在加强设备、技术和教学的支持下，我们将引入三个新的学期课程。第一种是小规模的入门课程，将采用学生提出问题、设计实验、分析数据和交流科学信息的模式，通过关注通常与个别教员的研究相关的综合主题。第二和第三门课程是两个学期的顺序，重点是解决有机问题。每门课程都以研究为基础，主要在细胞和分子层面（第一学期），或主要在个人、群体和社区层面（第二学期）对机体功能进行解释。为期数周的实验室将综合从分子到生态系统的生物组织的各个层面的信息，并在第二学期重新审视和应用第一学期开发的概念、模型系统和数据。我们期望这个新的核心课程能够极大地提高学生的兴趣和科学准备水平。

The College is reforming its biology core curriculum to enhance student learning of the process of biology, give introductory students authentic research experience, present modem, integrative biology to majors, and enhance opportunities for interdisciplinary study. Biology's rapid expansion challenges educators, who must teach clear biological principles amidst an overwhelming and ever-growing amount of information. A promising approach to this challenge is to use research-based learning to move away from teaching biology as a collection of facts and toward teaching biology as it is actually practiced. Meanwhile, the growth of integrative research fields suggests that advances in biology are becoming increasingly dependent on integration across sub-disciplines. We propose an introductory curriculum that combines extensive research-based study within an integrative framework. With support to enhance equipment, technology, and instruction, we will introduce three new semester-long courses. The first is a small enrollment introductory course that will apply the model of having students pose questions, design experiments, analyze data, and communicate scientific information, by focusing on integrative topics that will often be related to individual faculty members' research. The second and third courses are a two-semester sequence focused on organismal problem solving. Each course applies a research-based style to develop explanations for organismal function, mainly at the levels of cells and molecules (semester 1), or mainly at the levels of individuals, populations, and communities (semester 2). Multi-week laboratories will synthesize information across levels of biological organization from molecules to ecosystems, with concepts, model systems, and data developed in the first semester being revisited and applied in the second. We expect this new core curriculum to develop substantially the level of interest and scientific preparation of our students.