The introduction of Vision and Change by AAAS and the recommendation that biology departments amend their curricula to focus on key concepts and skills necessary for graduates have led to a re-envisioning of introductory curricula across the nation. Many of the “standard” biology text books have realigned their focus with Vision and Change, while new texts have emerged that completely revise how we teach introductory biology majors. One such textbook is Integrating Concepts in Biology (ICB), by Campbell, Heyer, and Paradise. Many departments, including ours, have adopted this text as a novel way to teach biology majors, focusing on active learning, the scientific method, and specifically, understanding data. However, with all of these revisions to biology textbooks, there have been no revisions or insights into corresponding labs for a typical 1-year introductory course sequence. Here, we provide a description of our 1-year lab sequence, emphasizing the scientific method and novel research, with a focus on the five “Big Ideas” presented in ICB. By removing the “cookbook” labs typical of most introductory laboratory courses, we found that this system better emphasized the focus of Vision and Change and, concomitantly, student appeared to enjoy the lab sequence and see the relevance to class material better, compared to previous years. We believe that this lab organization is a simple design that is not resource-intensive and can be utilized at schools of any size or budget.
展开▼
机译：美国科学促进会（AAAS）引入了“远见与变革”（Vision and Change），并建议生物学系修改课程以专注于毕业生所需的关键概念和技能，这导致全国范围内对入门课程的重新构想。许多“标准”生物学教科书都将其重点重新定位于“愿景与变革”，同时出现了新的教科书，这些教科书完全改变了我们教授生物学入门课程的方式。其中一本教科书是坎贝尔（Campbell），海耶（Heyer）和天堂（Paradise）撰写的《生物学中的整合概念》（ICB）。包括我们部门在内的许多部门都采用此文本作为教授生物学专业的新颖方法，重点在于主动学习，科学方法，尤其是理解数据。但是，对于生物学教科书的所有这些修订，对于典型的1年入门课程序列，都没有对相应实验室的修订或见解。在这里，我们将介绍我们为期一年的实验顺序，重点介绍科学方法和新颖研究，重点是ICB提出的五个“大创意”。通过删除大多数入门性实验课程中典型的“烹饪书”实验室，我们发现该系统更好地强调了“愿景与变革”的重点，因此，与以前相比，学生似乎更喜欢实验顺序，并更好地看到了与课堂材料的相关性年份。我们认为，这个实验室组织是一个简单的设计，不会占用大量资源，并且可以在任何规模或预算的学校中使用。
展开▼
