ICP for an Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program at Colorado College

科罗拉多学院提议在化学、地质学、经济学和生物系现有的环境课程教学设备上增加电感耦合等离子体光谱仪（ICP），以加强新的跨学科环境科学项目的教学。为了满足学生对环境科学教育的需求，各院系开设了新课程，改进了现有课程。为这些学生提供实质性课程的下一步是加强环境课程的数量分析部分。拟议的ICP由于其多成分分析能力，特别有效地使学生参与开发和评价各种备选模型，并提供定量数据。该ICP将被化学、生物学、地质学和经济学等环境课程的学生用于分析空气和水中的元素污染物，植物和土壤中的养分和有毒金属，以及研究食物网中重金属的生物积累。科罗拉多学院的教师坚信，科学应该作为实验室或实地经验来教授，在这些经验中，建立模型和理论来解释观察结果，并且最好的实验室教学经验包含了原始研究的重要组成部分，使学生能够参与科学实践。学生们不仅为可能的教学、毕业或工业工作做好了准备，而且非科学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，我们期望ICP进一步加强自然科学和社会科学院系之间的互动。

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.