A New Approach to Introductory College Biology

这是一项计划，旨在改进和更新一门招生人数较多的初级生物学课程的授课和内容。我们计划采用工作室的方法来教授这门课程：80名学生将以两人或四人一组的小组工作，由教师和研究生指导学习过程。取代传统的正式讲课/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。该工作室强调小组合作和学生主导的学习。为了使普通课程更贴近学生，我们计划将其按专业和/或共同兴趣分成工作室部分。我们的假设是，具有相似目标的学生之间的互动和对相关例子的关注将提高我们课程中的学习和保持能力。对于女性、非传统学生和少数族裔来说，情况可能尤其如此。在将工作室形式引入基础科学课程的其他机构，初步研究表明，那些以工作室形式参加第一门课程的学生在后来的更高级课程中的表现有所改善。我们将通过几种方式传播我们的项目成果：1)由于课程材料将放在万维网上，因此许多地方都可以访问。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)我们将参加地区性和全国性的教育会议，介绍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.