This proposal is a natural extension of significant changes in undergraduate science education for science majors that were achieved with the introduction of Quest Courses. The funds requested will be used to initiate similar changes in the science curriculum for non-science majors. The courses that will be developed as part of this program will apply an inquiry-based approach in which students will be exposed to the scientific method. They will address the larger view of science, by exploring what constitutes a scientific theory, by providing students with the opportunity to engage in scientific hypothesis testing in the laboratory, and by examining the writings of scientists and their humanist contemporaries about the worldview that science provides. Rather than "show and tell," we will focus on the process of discovery. This process will not only be used to teach the basic principles of science, but will also be studied from a historical perspective.
Most of the funds requested for the development of these courses will be used to provide teaching relief for the faculty involved, providing them with an opportunity to focus on course development for one semester. In addition, we will create study/writing groups to support the students taking these courses, and to carry out an in-depth assessment of the success of the envisioned innovations. The courses developed will be offered for at least three consecutive years and workshops will be organized at the end of each year to evaluate the success of our innovations. Computer technology will be used extensively in several of the proposed courses, and the University will provide matching funds for the purchase of the required equipment. These funds, estimated to be around $ 190,000, and the waiver of indirect cost recovery, which corresponds to $ 116,000, combined with the $ 100,000 that were invested by the University in the Quest Program clearly indicates the commitment of the University to institution-wide reform of undergraduate education.
The United States will need a scientifically and technologically literate citizenry to cope with the accelerating pace of change and with the decisions that must be made in setting educational, industrial, and national priorities. Only an educated public can evaluate competing claims about risk and benefit and make reasonable choices and decisions about technical issues, whether it is to fund research at the national level or to evaluate the credibility of evidence presented in a court of law.
However, most students in Universities do not choose to major in science- or technology-related fields. At the University of Rochester, 72% of undergraduates major in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Many institutions have attempted to introduce non-science majors to the ways in which science and technology function. These science courses for non-majors are usually based on one of two schemes. One is "Show them everything", and the other is "Show them what they think they need."
The "Show them everything" scheme attempts to show students everything about a field of science in one or possibly two semesters. So a non-major taking a physics course is bombarded in one semester with Classical Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, all without significant mathematics. The claim is that students appreciate the scientific method and the beauty of science even if they cannot do science by the end of the course. However, it is impossible for any student to sort out the amount of information presented in a one-semester of "Show them everything" course. Even science majors take many semesters to make sense of it all, and they are motivated to pursue the area even in the face of confusion. The non-major never has the time to sort out the mass of material and have it make sense.
The "Show them what they think they need" approach usually offers courses that are tightly focused on topics of interest to students. "Physics of Hi-Fi," "Chemistry in the Environment," or other topical courses are examples of this approach. In such courses, students only see smatterings of extremely complicated topics that are still debated among experts, and so are left with minimal understanding of the material. In both approaches, students achieve at best a declarative knowledge of the field rather than a functional one. They might be able to state isolated facts, but are not able to use the underlying theories to form new theories or to evaluate a new strategy as opposed to an old one.
To improve the quality of the undergraduate education outside the major, the University of Rochester recently adopted a new requirement that all undergraduates must engage in three areas of focused study: one each in Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Science / Engineering / Mathematics. One area of focus will be the student's major, and students must elect a Cluster of three related courses in each of the two divisions outside the major. They must earn a C average in each cluster. Students of Engineering, because of the already strict requirements of the ABET-accredited curricula, will have to complete only one Cluster in Humanities or Social Science, and are required to take another two courses in those areas by their Departments.
This new curriculum will require every Humanities and Social Science major to take at least three related courses in the Natural Science / Engineering / Mathematics area. It presents the University with an opportunity to significantly revise and improve the experience of non-majors and to change the way the sciences, engineering, and mathematics are taught to non-science majors. To structure this change coherently and to monitor the results of change will require the faculty in these areas to work together in fresh, even unprecedented ways. A set of goals and objectives for these science clusters will provide guidance for faculty participating in new cluster development. Accordingly, a cross-disciplinary group of Natural Science / Engineering / Mathematics faculty [UR] has been meeting to determine the basic ideas and concepts that new clusters should attempt to address. We believe that clusters for non-science majors should stress the following:
As appropriate, specific courses and clusters should set more targeted goals, such as:
The courses that will be developed as part of this program will apply an inquiry-based approach in which students will be exposed to the scientific method. These courses will address the larger view of science by exploring what constitutes a scientific theory, by providing students with the opportunity to engage in scientific hypothesis testing in the laboratory, and by examining the writings of scientists and their humanist contemporaries about the worldview that science provides. Rather than "show and tell," we will focus on the process of discovery. This process will not only be used to teach the basic principles of science, but will also be studied from a historical perspective (Several major scientific concepts that provided radical challenges to accepted world views at the time they were proposed will be used to illustrate the operation of the scientific method). The students will also be exposed to the design process, specifically the process of determining the constraints and the optimization of the design. This is a topic to which even science majors are usually not exposed, but which clearly affects everyday life.
The students enrolled in the proposed Clusters will receive a significant exposure to computer technology. Computers will be used for data collection and analysis, scientific simulations, and information retrieval. A computerized class room will be developed for the inquiry-based courses in which lectures, recitations and laboratories are combined.
The possible impact of the Cluster requirement on science education for non-science majors is obvious. To address the needs for general improvements in undergraduate education, the University recently introduced Quest Courses. The science-based Quest Courses are aimed primarily at science majors, but have the same goals that are outlined here for the proposed science Clusters. The combination of Science Clusters and Quest Courses will lead to institution-wide reform of undergraduate education in science and technology for both science and non-science majors.
Most of the requested funds will be used to provide teaching relief for the faculty that will develop the initial set of courses intended to achieve the goals outlined above, to create study/writing groups to support the students taking these courses, and to carry out an in-depth assessment of the success of the envisioned innovations. The University will match the funding from the National Science Foundation by providing the required hardware for the courses proposed as part of this program, including the computerized classroom.
A small fraction of the funds requested as part of this proposal will be used to provide support for two very important aspects of quality management that are often missing in curriculum development. Those are benchmarking and training. Benchmarking will allow faculty who are interested in developing new areas of teaching to identify and visit institutions that have successful programs that might be adaptable to the University of Rochester. Training sessions will be held to assist the faculty who have already expressed interest in using new pedagogical techniques and also to recruit additional faculty to be a part of these programs.
The proposal is organized as follows. In Section II, recent curricular changes at the University of Rochester, which resulted in the formation of the above mentioned Clusters, are discussed. The success of some of these innovations, like the Quest program, are discussed in Section III. The courses that will be developed as part of this proposal are summarized in Section IV. In Section V, the study/writing groups that will be created to support the students in the proposed Cluster courses will be discussed. The process with which the success of our curricular changes will be addressed is described in Section VI. The timeline of the proposed program is outlined in Section VII. Finally, the proposal will be summarized in Section VIII.
For nearly forty years, undergraduate liberal education at the University of Rochester has emphasized the acquisition of skills and the completion of distribution requirements. Since 1985, students have been expected to acquire skills in writing and foreign language and to complete distribution requirements of two isolated courses each in the three broad divisions of humanities, social science, and natural science, and one course in formal reasoning. In the Fall of 1991, the College Curriculum Committee began an extensive review of this curricular structure and concluded that:
From 1991 - 1994 successive curriculum committees worked systematically to respond to weaknesses in the established structure. The committees aimed to develop curricular programs that would both offer students a high quality liberal arts education and reflect Rochester's distinctive strengths as a small and distinguished research university. They focused on the areas of so-called "general education," courses students take before, outside, and alongside their field of major concentration. The results are two fundamental changes in Rochester's undergraduate programs:
A "divisional Cluster," a set of at least three related semester courses, in each of the other two areas outside of the major. Students must maintain a grade point average of 2.0 in their major and in each of their divisional Clusters.
The goal of these curricular reforms is to improve the quality of undergraduate education by lowering the boundaries between faculty and student learning. Professors at research universities are often depicted as indifferent to undergraduate education, and the work of research itself has been cast as the enemy of good undergraduate teaching. At Rochester, we hold that the reality is just the opposite. Researchers are the quintessential learners, and research faculties know better than any other sector of our society how "to make learning the habit of a lifetime." In fact, teaching is essential to research because it often is the context in which new ideas are first formulated, expressed, and tested. We believe that by grounding our undergraduate curriculum in the practices of faculty learning, we can make our students active partners in learning rather than mere consumers of education.
We aim to accomplish this goal at two levels of student experience. With Quest Courses, our goal is to make the ethos, values, and practices of research shape the early years of college learning, when students should be experimenting with their interests. Second, with the College Program, we hope to structure the realm of breadth, essential to a liberal education, to reflect the traits of faculty learning. In the remainder of this Section, we will focus on the College Program for which we propose to develop courses specifically aimed at teaching science and technology to non-science majors.
Three features central to faculty learning are the hallmarks of Rochester's College Program: curiosity, competence, and community:
Moreover, the "knowledge explosion" -- what Stanley Katz, President of ACLS, calls the "exponential increase in the range and quantity of new knowledge in all fields that must be included in curricula and research programs" -- makes it unrealistic to conceive of college study in terms of coverage and content. The growth of knowledge in all fields means that no four-year college curriculum can claim to teach all the subjects that students could legitimately need to know. The density of knowledge in discrete fields means that a single course, particularly at the beginning level, can no longer claim to provide meaningful exposure to how that field creates and assesses knowledge.
For these reasons, Rochester's College Program conceives general education neither in terms of a fixed curriculum, which cannot reflect how the faculty actually understands or assesses knowledge, nor in terms of random sampling of isolated courses, which cannot show students how a subject works. Rather, we believe that for students to understand how a field of learning actually works, they need to spend sufficient time in it to learn its language, become familiar with its artifacts, and experience its logic. However general the principles of thought, research is always about something, and fields of knowledge invariably focus on particulars, which shape how the thinking is done. Sustained and integrated study in varied fields not only reflects the values and practices of a research culture, it also is the best way for students to learn about a range of subjects, experience multiple modes of inquiry, and acquire the complex problem-solving and analytical skills needed for a lifetime of learning.
The College Program offers students structured participation in three intellectual communities--disciplinary or interdisciplinary--each responsible for a field or topic of study. It provides students with formal relationships to three departments or faculty groups and the opportunity to develop intellectual relationships in each. The educational responsibility of departments and program committees encompasses participants in the Clusters, who will be in the department or program for a considerable period of time. It thus formally extends the focused interests of research-based departments and interdepartmental faculty groups to students' general learning.
Quest Courses are so-named to signify that the discovery and construction of knowledge are at the heart of the work of a research faculty. Quest Courses embody a research-based pedagogy; they exemplify research as a way of learning. Quest Courses are typically small (15-25 undergraduates), exploratory, and research-oriented. They replicate and incorporate in their structure and pedagogy the best aspects of faculty learning. Quest Courses emphasize conversation and collaboration. Faculty learning is more conversational and collaborative than typical classroom study. Faculty learn from one another by sharing work, discussing it, and responding to criticism. Quest Courses encourage this sort of communication between teacher and student and among students themselves. Students in Quest Courses work with one another in small and medium-sized groups and exchange data and preliminary findings.
In general, Quest Courses develop various ways for students to teach one another, just as faculty do. Quest Courses feature recursion, the perspective of the second look. Research-based knowledge comes not from a single scan of material but from multiple readings of a text, image, or film or from repeated examinations of data and phenomena. The recursion that defines faculty learning and helps faculty assess the extent and progress of their understanding is largely absent from undergraduate study. Quest Courses aim to redress this.
Quest Courses are library-, data-, or laboratory- intensive. They include extensive writing and oral presentation. Students in Humanities Quest Courses are expected to delve deeply into primary texts and documents. In Social Science Quests, students are guided in the original scrutiny of existing data or in the generation and analysis of their own new data via survey, participant observation, or other techniques of social science research. Science Quest Courses draw students into the generation and analysis of new experimental data rather than the mastery of predetermined techniques and protocols. Quest Courses can be time-intensive.
The development of 6 or 8 credit Quest Courses that extend over two semesters is encouraged. Just as faculty learning requires the dedication of significant blocks -- not random snippets -- of time, so too should good undergraduate learning. Quest Courses help students think about various problems and modes of inquiry. They therefore sacrifice coverage to the benefit of the process of investigation. Quest Courses emphasize the following skills:
Quest Courses focus on problems of argumentation and interpretation. They make students participants in the construction and evaluation of knowledge. For example, a Quest Course can set forth its material in terms of competing models, or in terms of the history of its discipline, so that students can work through and assess the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to a single topic or problem. Alternatively, a Quest Course can be centered around current problems discussed in the media. Students learn to break an issue into various components, find out how the media treat it, then do semi-independent investigation. Some examples of courses that were developed as part of the Quest program are:
Quest Courses were introduced in the 1995 - 1996 academic year. Although it is too early to determine the success of these courses, the response of the students to these course innovations has been very positive.
The University has provided a total of $ 100,000 for course innovations associated with the Quest program, indicating the strong commitment of the University Administration towards the reform of undergraduate education.
The core of the science Clusters that will be developed contains two courses: Physics by Inquiry and Science and Literature (see Figure 1). A student interested in the scientific method can complement these two core courses with the Philosophy of Science course, thus completing the Scientific Method Cluster. A student interested in a more technical Cluster can take the Design course instead, and complete the Science and Technology by Inquiry Cluster. If the proposed course development is successful, more courses will be developed based on the same approach. Future courses we are currently considering include: Astronomy by Inquiry, Technology by Inquiry, and Statistics and Risk in the Everyday World.
In this Section the first courses that will be developed as part of this program will be described in some detail.
The goal of this course is to provide the students with direct experience in the process of science. The design of this course is based on the belief that science can not be learned by reading, listening, memorizing and problem solving, but requires active mental engagement. Although most science courses for science majors are supplemented with required labs, even in those courses active engagement is rather limited. In most of our current science courses for non-science majors, the laboratory component is missing, and these courses often fail to provide the students with a scientific intuition and an appreciation for the scientific process.
Physics by Inquiry will focus on the scientific method. The students will start from their own observations, develop basic scientific concepts, use and interpret different forms of scientific representations, and construct explanatory models with predictive capabilities. The students will develop scientific reasoning skills and gain experience in relating scientific concepts, representations, and models to real-world phenomena. By providing a direct exposure to the scientific process, we hope to provide the students with a solid foundation for scientific literacy. Topics that are covered in this course are physics and astronomy.
To achieve the goal of active involvement, the lectures will be given in a computer equipped classroom in which each student (or pair of students) has access to a computer and is able to carry out data analysis during lectures. Simple experiments can be carried out by each student individually. More sophisticated experiments are carried out by the instructor, and the data collected are available to each student via the network. For example, complicated two dimensional motion can be videotaped and digitized for immediate analysis by the students.
In the astronomy component of this course, the students will gain hands-on experience by making observations at the Mees Observatory in Naples, NY. It is envisioned that several classes will be held there to make direct observations. This will require an automatization of the observatory and the installation of a CCD camera. Images are stored in digital form and can be further analyzed in later lectures on campus.
The funds required for the computer equipment for the computerized classroom and the automatization of the Mees observatory will be provided by the University as matching funds for this proposal. Some travel funds are requested as part of this proposal to visit other academic institutions, like RPI [WI94], where computerized lectures have been introduced successfully in physics courses for science majors. Although using this approach in courses for non-science majors will require a significant course development, we envision that the technical details of our facility can be largely based on the experience gained elsewhere.
This course sets out to explore some of the human consequences of the scientific worldview through the writings of scientists about the implications of their theories and through works of fiction by their contemporaries, writing either in celebration or in vilification of the march of scientific progress.
The boundary between science and literature is seen as somewhat artificial - physics can be seen as a kind of poetry -- an act of the human imagination -- and literature as a kind of science -- an attempt to explain experience, and an embodiment in fiction of the world-views of physicists. What do artists and scientists have to say about the same scientific ideas? What picture of man does science provide as a result, say, of Monod's reductionism?
The course will concentrate on several major scientific concepts that provided radical challenges to accepted world views at the time they were proposed: Classical determinism in the 18th century through the mechanics of Newton and Leibniz; classical indeterminism in the 19th century in the thermodynamics of Boltzmann and Maxwell; quantum indeterminism in the 20th century in the writings of Bohr and Einstein on the epistemology of measurement; and the reprise of classical indeterminism in the 20th century through the study of chaos. The final flowering of classical determinism, evident in Einstein's theories of relativity in the 20th century, and the still unsolved problem of how this can be made compatible with quantum mechanics will also provide an example of how science progresses, and how scientists have ontology implicit in their explorations.
The humanist view of these goings-on can be found in the writings of poets and novelists while, and well after, these concepts were developed. From the science academy of Lagoda in Swift and the caricature of Leibniz in Candide, to the rejection by Lawrence of the seemingly preposterous vision of reality proposed by Schrödinger and Heisenberg, through all of the disturbing fantasies of too-predictable or too-random societies organized according to scientific models, writers have explored the consequences of science in depth. The scientific ideas, and the reactions to them, will be explored by the students in literary analyses, via explanations of important scientific ideas, and through literature, art and music as analogies of scientific models.
The goal of this course is to provide an exposure to the design process and practice for non-science majors, with emphasis on design task description, design constraints, design optimization, and non-unique design solutions arising from the design process. Emphasis will also be placed on developing team work skills, as well as oral, and written presentations.
Such a course adopts a risky and unique approach: that design can be taught to and practiced by non-science majors early in their undergraduate education (typically in the first two years). The course will provide the students with a basic understanding of the design process, as it applies to both large and small structures, whether man-made or biological. The goal is to provide a sophisticated view of how science and technology transforms a scientific concept via design into a product addressing various human needs.
The course will focus on the application of the basic principles of mechanics to two main areas: the design of man-made structures, and the design of biological structures. Course work will first consist of design examples which will be discussed and analyzed in common with all students. In this portion, the emphasis will be on design task description, design constraints, design optimization, and the non-unique solutions arising from the design process. In addition to engineering and technical constraints, we will discuss economic, ethical, legal, aesthetic, and environmental constraints, and emphasize that a successful design should meet all of these criteria.
The second half of the course will be spent on group projects, each group designing a simple engineering structure or analyzing the basic design incorporated in a biological structure. Each group will consist of two or three students, who will be requested to submit a description of the design project of their choice, and a subdivision of design tasks at the beginning of their project; a clear outline of how these tasks will be performed and synthesized into a final design; and a final design report which will first be presented orally in front of the rest of the class, as well as in a written report submitted at the end of the semester.
From man-made structures, we will examine designs used for peaceful as well as military purposes. Examples from peaceful designs over three millennia will be examined: ancient temples, Roman domes and aqueducts, cathedrals, modern bridges, and modern materials used in design: stone, steel, timber, glass, composites. Examples from war will be the design of weapons: the ancient bow and the spear, the ancient war ship, design of missiles and nuclear reactors.
In biological structures, we will examine the effect of size and scale in dictating the design of a biological structure and the basic principles that dictate the mechanical behavior and locomotion of living organisms: Surface forces for "small" living organisms (bacteria, insects), gravity forces for "large" organisms (trees, mammals).
Apart from the practices of science, and the views of the practitioners, an important component of understanding the goals and nature of scientific endeavor must be an appreciation for what can actually be said about the universe as a consequence of any theory. The goal of this course is to complement the "practical" Inquiry courses by providing an examination of the major issues raised by the whole scientific enterprise. These include: What is a scientific explanation ? What are statistical laws ? How do statistical explanations work ? How are scientific explanations related to other forms of explanation ? Is there a parallel between prediction and explanation (to explain something is to show how it might have been predicted) ? Do statistical laws explain rare events ? What is causation ? What are causal laws ? How are they related to the question of determinism ? How are they related to predictive laws ? What is the nature of scientific argument: argument from empirical and experimental evidence to scientific conclusions ? Does it have presuppositions ? Is it just a matter of opinion, or does it have objective warrant ? Is it the same as, or different from, other sorts of arguments in philosophy or mathematics ? What does science tell us about the ultimate furniture of the Universe: is there exactly what science says there is (scientific realism) ? Is there less than what science says there is (instrumentalism: scientific laws are just tools for making predictions) ? Is there more than what science says there is (idealism: ultimate reality transcends phenomena)?
In keeping with the internuncial nature of the proposed cluster, the tools of mathematics and logic will be used sparingly. The core of the course will be to raise questions, and to engage students in thinking about science, the sort of knowledge it provides, and its human implications.
Much of the current pedagogical literature urges us to enhance the supportive and collaborative nature of science instruction [TO90, TO92, GA93]. The Cluster program outlined above is designed to address these issues, but we are aware that students' in-class time accounts for only a portion of their experience with the course; what students do with their study time can significantly extend the impact of these courses on their lives.
In order to provide a supportive and challenging environment for these courses outside the classroom itself, we propose to offer study groups for Physics by Inquiry and Design, the more technical courses, and writing tutoring for Science and Literature and The Philosophy of Science, the more writing intensive courses. Neither of these two forms of academic support would be intended exclusively for students who find the course material daunting; in other words, these approaches are not designed as remedial instruction. Our study group model, for example, is very much proposed as a means of extending the opportunities for students to engage in discussions about the course material and to work through challenging problems together, which we view as very similar to the way the scientific community as a whole functions. And the instructional philosophy which drives our approaches to writing tutoring fosters the interaction of more senior writers working with less experienced ones, rather than a merely prescriptive method of instruction.
We have had considerable success with the study group and the writing tutoring models here at the University of Rochester. The inclusion of these two forms of support would allow us to extend an already successful support program on campus to the proposed Cluster project. The groups and the tutoring address our wish to make these course challenging and supportive, both in class and out of class, and to help students develop the clarity in writing that we regard as crucial to their success.
Evaluation is crucial, both to ensure timely adjustments and modifications in programming as it is in progress, and to strengthen the value of the project for future dissemination. We envision mid-program and end-of-project assessment in both quantitative and qualitative forms.
For each enrollee in the proposed Cluster, a student record will be collected, which will include information such as class year, grade point average, intended or declared major, and similar demographic data. This will become our database from which other evaluative measures will be developed.
All instructors, teaching assistants, writing tutors, study groups leaders, and students will receive mid-semester course evaluations, inviting them to comment on perceived strengths and weaknesses of the program and to make suggestions for revisions. The evaluation format will include both Likert-scale items and open-ended questions for written response. A similar evaluation will be distributed at the conclusion of each semester, with questions that especially invite comments regarding the revision or dissemination of the project.
At the conclusion of the project, members of the instructional staff and student participants will be invited to attend structured focus groups. These groups will allow for extended discussion of the initial project's assets and limitations, and will provide the opportunity for the project leaders to gather additional ideas for the application of the program to systems-wide planning.
Also at the conclusion of the project, the student database will be used to compile information regarding successful completion of the Cluster courses in comparison to students' overall academic success, changes in declared majors, retention in the institution, and other indicators of student performance. This data will be used in making decisions about future curricular planning and Cluster development.
Fall
|
Spring
|
Summer
| |
| 1996-97
|
Workshop
for Faculty
Develop Assessment
|
Course
Development: Physics by Inquiry Literature of Science Design of Man-made and Biological Structures Retreat for Development Faculty Benchmark Trip to Other Institution Workshop for Faculty
Develop Assessment Tools
|
|
| 1997-98
|
Teach
Courses: Physics by Inquiry Literature of Science Retreat for Development Faculty Benchmark Trip to Other Institution Workshop for Faculty
Develop Assessment Tools
|
Teach
Courses: Design of Man-made and Biological Structures Philosophy of Science Retreat for Development Faculty Benchmark Trip to Other Institution Workshop for Faculty
Develop Assessment Tools
|
Tune
Courses: Physics by Inquiry Literature of Science
Design of Man-made and Biological Structures
|
1998-99
|
Teach
Courses: Physics by Inquiry Literature of Science Retreat for Development Faculty Benchmark Trip to Other Institution Workshop for Faculty
Develop Assessment Tools
|
Teach
Courses: Design of Man-made and Biological Structures Philosophy of Science Retreat for Development Faculty Benchmark Trip to Other Institution Workshop for Faculty
Develop Assessment Tools
|
|
| 1999-2000
|
Teach
Courses: Physics by Inquiry
Literature of Science
|
Teach Courses: Design of Man-made and Biological Structures Philosophy of Science
Assess Program Goals
|
Recently adopted changes in the curriculum at the University of Rochester requires every Humanities and Social Science major to take at least three courses in the Natural Science / Engineering / Mathematics area (a so-called Cluster). This proposal has brought together a cross-disciplinary group of Natural Science / Engineering / Mathematics faculty to explore the development of a new curriculum that can produce an institution-wide reform in undergraduate science education.
This proposal is a natural extension of significant changes in undergraduate science education for science majors that were achieved with the introduction of the so-called Quest Courses. The funds requested will be used to initiate similar changes in the science curriculum for non-science majors. The courses that will be developed as part of this program will apply an inquiry-based approach in which students will be exposed to the scientific method. They will address the larger view of science, by exploring what constitutes a scientific theory, by providing students with the opportunity to engage in scientific hypothesis testing in the laboratory, and by examining the writings of scientists and their humanist contemporaries about the worldview that science provides. Rather than "show and tell," we will focus on the process of discovery. This process will not only be used to teach the basic principles of science, but will also be studied from a historical perspective.
Computer technology will be used extensively in several of the proposed courses, and the University will provide funds for the purchase of the required equipment. These funds, estimated to be around $ 190,000, and the waiver of indirect cost recovery, which corresponds to $ 116,000, combined with the $ 100,000 that were invested by the University in the Quest Program clearly indicates the commitment of the University to institution-wide reform of undergraduate education.
[GA93] M. Garland, The mathematics workshop model: An interview with Uri Treisman, Journal of Developmental Education, 16, (3), 14-22 (1993).
[TO90] S. Tobias, They're not dumb, They're different. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation (1990).
[TO92] S. Tobias, Revitalizing undergraduate science: Why some things work and most don't. Tucson, AZ, Research Corporation (1992).
[UR] A. Basu (Earth and Environmental Sciences), J. Friedly (Chemical Engineering), B. Green (Dean of Undergraduate Studies), J. Lambropolous (Mechanical Engineering), P. Lennie (Brain and Cognitive Sciences). J. Mottley (Electrical Engineering), J. Neisendorfer (Mathematics), A. Olek (Biology), V. Roth (Learning Assistance), D. Turner (Chemistry), I. Walmsley (Optics), F. Wolfs (Physics and Astronomy)
[WI94] J. M. Wilson, The CUPLE Physics Studio, The Physics Teacher, 32, 518 (1994)