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Inquiry-Based Biology and Biological Chemistry: 
An Evolutionary Tale

Bruce A. Voyles, Patricia Armstrong Johnson Professor of Biological Chemistry

Grinnell College
Grinnell, IO 50112


About 450 students, a third of Grinnell students, major in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics, or Psychology, the five departments in the Science Division. Student-faculty research collaborations in the sciences begun in the 1940’s increased until, in the 1960’s, several faculty members in both the chemistry and biology departments maintained research labs with the active involvement of students in their work. The chemistry department instituted a formal research requirement for its majors in 1981. The biology department followed suit several years later but was quickly forced to rescind the requirement when the number of majors became too large for the number of faculty in the department to mentor effectively. Nevertheless, student/faculty research collaborations continued to increase through the 1990’s, supported both by external grants and substantial institutional funds.

Although student/faculty research collaborations were increasing, the biology and chemistry curricula remained fairly traditional during the same period. As Table 1 shows, both departments had a linear sequence of four required core courses followed by a modest selection of upper-level elective courses. Biology majors could choose four upper level electives to complete their majors while chemistry majors were allowed only two elective slots since they were required to complete a semester of physical chemistry and of research. All of the courses in both departments had both lecture and lab components. 

Table 1: Biology and Chemistry Curricula in 1999

Pedagogical reform began in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s led to the development of introductory courses in a workshop format, research-type projects as a significant component of the lab experience, and active learning exercises in lecture periods. We carried out an assessment project in which a traditional lecture/lab introductory chemistry course was compared to a problems-based course, both taught by the same professors and covering the same material. The assessment demonstrated that students learned the same amount in both sections, but those who had taken the problem-based course retained more the next year.¹

However, more and more of our prospective and enrolled students wanted to have a curriculum that focused on the interfaces between biology and chemistry. Since the existing curricula in both departments began with linear sequences of four courses, students had to be over-committed in both biology and chemistry in order to reach the upper-level courses in molecular biology and biochemistry that interested them. Concentrating in two departments within one division ran counter to Grinnell’s expectation that a student take a breadth of courses outside of his major. The problem was exacerbated because tutorial advisors refused to permit first-year students to take both introductory courses in biology and chemistry. 

Within the existing curriculum, a student who started the biology sequence in her first semester could take upper-level biology courses as a junior, but since no student was allowed to take more than one lab science in the first year, she could not start the chemistry sequence until her sophomore year. As a result, she had to delay upper-level chemistry courses until her senior year. In addition, this student would be taking her introductory chemistry courses concurrently with the sophomore level molecular genetics and cell biology courses, when the chemistry should obviously have come first. If, on the other hand, she delayed starting biology until her sophomore year, she would need to take all four of their upper-level biology courses in her senior year. Chemistry students interested in biochemistry faced similar problems on the reverse side of this coin. We suspected that we were probably losing well-qualified students who did not want to jump through all our hoops in order to study molecular biology or biochemistry. 

Several faculty from the biology and chemistry departments suggested that the solution to all these problems had to be something highly collaborative that would decease the lengthy prerequisite chains in both departments at the same time. No one was sure how to do that, and each department had members who were not especially interested in changing their curricula in order to meet the needs of students who wanted something outside the traditional boundaries of their disciplines. Until a shared sense of mission could be developed, no significant change was possible.

Biology + Chemistry = Biological Chemistry

The cell and molecular biologists and the organic and physical chemists found a shared sense of mission in the idea of creating an interdepartmental major. They began to meet regularly to think about what such a program might look like. At first the chemists referred to a biochemistry major while the biologists responded by calling it a molecular biology major, so the first real decision was to call the interdepartmental major biological chemistry to give both sides equal weight. Of such petty details are wonderful solutions built! 

As the talks progressed we found, like countless others before us, that faculty members in both departments had to be willing to talk to their own departmental colleagues and also treat faculty of the other department as colleagues. Each had to be willing to change, and be willing to give up some turf so that change could be a win-win situation. And we had to be willing to make changes even when some of our faculty members were not on board. Good communication, mutual respect, and flexibility were all obviously necessary, but so was a bit of ruthlessness. At Grinnell, both departments were accustomed to discussing an issue until they found a position everyone could agree upon. In effect, requiring consensus gives a veto to the most conservative person in the department and tends to retard or prevent significant movement away from the status quo. Real change is possible only when a critical mass of faculty are able to agree that they will proceed without unanimous consent and that, even if unwilling, the holdouts will just have to come along.

Our first objective was to streamline the introductory courses in both departments so that students could take a semester each of biology and of chemistry in their first year. Streamlining would have two benefits. One, students would not have to decide immediately upon arriving at Grinnell which discipline they were more interested in (remember that they can take only one lab science their first year). Two, students entering the second-level molecular/cell biology course would have already taken a semester of college chemistry rather than be taking it at the same time, as had been the case for biology majors. The second objective was to design a set of courses that gave students the maximum flexibility in choosing their majors. The biological chemistry working group proposed the set of courses shown in Table 2. This proposal addressed both logistical and curricular issues since students could elect any of the three possible majors up until pre-registration for their fourth semester. 

This proposal offered a curriculum that provided better integration of biology and chemistry. Because students would be required to take the first semester of organic chemistry and the molecular/cell biology course concurrently, faculty could make explicit links between the two in order to reinforce the concepts of both. For example, the organic chemist would include an example of a hydroxyl group reacting with a phosphate group when nucleophilic substitution reactions were presented, while the biologist would then push the electrons to show that addition of a nucleotide to a growing chain is a nucleophilic substitution. In the next semester, students taking Introduction to Biological Chemistry and Organic Chemistry II would benefit from similar linkage between biology and chemistry. 

Table 2: Integrated Curricula for the Biology, Biological Chemistry and Chemistry Majors. (Numbers in parenthesis refer to which semester the course is offered)

Of course, the working group recognized that the devil is in the details. Both departments would need to give up a semester of their introductory courses in order to make the new major possible. For the chemistry department this meant deciding what chemistry was absolutely necessary for a student to have before they began organic chemistry. It also meant that the order of topics in organic chemistry would need to be reexamined so that they would complement the molecular/cell biology course. 

There were similar problems to be addressed by the biology department but the vast breadth of this discipline made the task seem almost impossible at the beginning. Fortunately outside forces led to an exciting solution.

Assessment can actually be useful!

As part of the college’s preparation for its accreditation renewal, each department had to develop an assessment plan for measuring its students’ educational progress. The biology department began development of the assessment the way that we always started curriculum discussions, that is, with the question “What does a biologist need to know?” Each of us put his or her non-negotiable list of items on the table and then we struggled, with increasing vexation, to attempt to reconcile these lists to determine what a biology student should be required to know. It soon became evident that if we applied these content definitions, about half the faculty in the biology department could not be considered real biologists at all! For example, I, a virologist, and my colleagues who are a molecular biologist and an animal physiologist had never taken a field biology course, so we failed that criterion. Could we really demand that our students to be something that we ourselves were not? Moreover, because biology in the twenty-first century is exploding in scope, scale, and technology while traditional sub-disciplinary lines are blurring, content-driven criteria were only going to become increasingly more difficult to establish.

The breakthrough came when I asked my colleagues why they had become biological scientists. No one answered “Because I loved the lectures on subject X.” Instead, their answers were forms of “I loved the questions about X and trying to find the answers.” In other words, they gave active reasons that focused on process rather than content. Then we realized that our question should not be “What does a biologist need to know?” but rather “What does a biologist do?” We quickly agreed that biologists, like all other scientists, pose questions, design experiments or observations to answer those questions, collect and analyze data, and communicate their findings and ideas to other scientists.

If that is how we saw ourselves and what we do, shouldn’t we be teaching our students to be biologists who do all those things? Answering a resounding YES to that question liberated us from the shackles of content and freed us to take a completely fresh look at our entire curriculum. (If you think that sentence is a little too “corny” just remember that corn is good in Iowa!)

An Inquiry-based Biology Curriculum

Having made the decision that we would focus on the process of biology across our entire curriculum, we set about designing new courses to replace our four core courses. My suggestion was that we start with a research-intensive one-semester course that I called Introduction to Biological Inquiry. This course would contain elements of Grinnell’s First-year Tutorial that all faculty members teach. A feature of the Tutorial is that each faculty person offers a section uniquely designed around his or her specific interests. There is no requirement that a particular content be taught in a Tutorial, but rather that the topic chosen be a suitable vehicle for rigorous instruction in writing and oral communication. I envisioned a Biological Inquiry course similarly derived from each professor’s interest. Each section would focus on a particular topic, perhaps related to the professor’s personal research. The only requirement was that the students should be given rigorous instruction and practice in posing questions, designing and analyzing observations and experiments, and communicating their findings, as do professional biologists. Because the course was to model biological research, content would be introduced as students required specific information to deal with particular questions. Doing biology, not the facts, was the point. The flexibility of a workshop format seemed ideally suited to this type of course. 

After the initial rush of enthusiasm for this idea, however, doubts and fears began to creep into the minds of some faculty as they thought about the rest of the curriculum. Didn’t students need to know some common content when they finished their Biological Inquiry course and went on to the next course? These fears were somewhat allayed as we began to examine our ideas for individual sections. Regardless of the particular topic of each section, certain concepts appeared in all of them - cellular structure and function, the phenotype as the result of the interaction of the genotype and the environment, mutation, and evolution, for example. Likewise, certain techniques and procedures seemed to occur in all - descriptive statistics, graphing, and maintaining a good lab notebook. Thus the Biological Inquiry courses seemed truly Grinnellian in that they tucked the content inside the process without especially calling attention to it, just as many of our college requirements are part of the local ethos rather than explicit rules.

The Practice Runs 

Several of us did pilots of an inquiry-based course to see if the idea would actually work. A field biologist offered a class called Plant Reproductive Ecology while I gave a section entitled Emerging and Re-emerging Pathogens. We both limited our courses to what we thought would be the hardest possible audience - students who had taken absolutely no college-level lab science. On the first day of the course I asked students to fill out a brief autobiography (year in school, major, plans) and asked them for an honest answer to why they were enrolled. As I had anticipated, my class was filled with students who needed a science class in order to get permission to study off campus, students whose advisors insisted that they take a science class, as well as a handful who professed to be genuinely interested in the topic. Most said they had not liked science in high school and were rather afraid to take any science in college.

We began the lecture/discussion part of the course with a short essay called “Germs” by Lewis Thomas whose thesis is the conventional view that pathogenicity is a miscommunication about borders between organisms. At the same time we read an article from Atlantic Monthly by Judith Hooper called “A New Germ Theory” that reports on the work of Paul Ewald and his ideas on the evolution of infectious disease. This article also discusses examples of diseases such as peptic ulcers that we formerly (or still) attribute to environmental or genetic causes that are actually caused by microorganisms. These readings set up models for the students to explore during the semester as we considered diseases caused by various bacteria and viruses, how the body fights the disease agents, and how new human pathogens arise. We also examined how antibiotics work, how bacteria develop resistance to them, and how that resistance can spread to other species of bacteria. As often as possible, I tried to structure the lecture/discussion sessions with a light hand so that we could follow whatever path the students’ questions and comments led us to. The students frequently asked remarkably insightful questions that focused our progress far better than I could have planned. There were moments, however, when I longed for the good old days when I was in charge, as when a young woman asked if anyone had tested whether the amylase found in saliva inactivated HIV since she had heard that it did inactivate sperm!

Lab exercises focused on antibiotic resistance in bacteria from local water systems. After learning the basic techniques of culturing bacteria, students isolated tetracycline-resistant organisms, identified them to the level of genus and then conducted a series of projects of their own design using these bacteria. The early projects were often straight-forward and relatively simple, such as characterizing the spectrum of antibiotic resistance for a set of organisms or determining the minimum effective concentration of an antimicrobial agent. By the end of the semester, however, students were using PCR to look for specific tetracycline resistance genes or attempting to transfer antibiotic resistance from one organism to another. The course concluded with students presenting their projects in a poster session.

In keeping with the inquiry model, students were expected to search out answers to their own questions. Their sources included general biology and microbiology texts, as well as the primary scientific literature. Early in the semester I provided students with papers that we worked through and discussed, guided by a set of questions designed to help them read carefully and understand what they were reading. However, students had to find papers to support their lab projects and the oral presentation about an emerging or re-emerging pathogen that each student gave at the end of the semester. A special challenge I had not anticipated was helping students become more sophisticated in the use of the internet in their research. They quickly mastered the various search engines to locate articles in the primary literature, but tended to use very general search engines. Students would sometimes accept uncritically whatever sources were pulled up; one student felt that the Florida Citrus Board was a suitable source of information about the citric acid cycle! 

Was the trial class a success? By any measurement, the answer was a resounding yes. Several students wrote comments on their end-of-course evaluations saying that they finally understood what science was about. Another thanked me for letting them make their own mistakes and trusting them to work them out solutions for themselves. Many loved working in groups and felt that they learned a great deal from their class and lab mates. For one young man, the course was literally a life-changing event. This junior sociology/Spanish double major took the course to get the science credit he needed to gain permission to study in Spain. As a result of researching and writing a presentation on hepatitis C virus, he became fascinated with the public health issues surrounding the spread of hepatitis C. His new interests led in his senior year to winning a Watson fellowship to study hepatitis C infection rates and hepatitis incidence in Italy, Egypt, and India. After his Watson year he plans to enter graduate study in epidemiology and public health at Tulane University.

Introduction to Biological Inquiry Course as part of the Curriculum 

The biology department concluded that the trial version of the inquiry-based course achieved our goal of helping students learn how biology is done, so we decided to begin offering Introduction to Biological Inquiry as the beginning course in a new curriculum in the fall of 2000. Multiple sections of this course are offered both semesters, so students can choose when they wish to take the class. The student clientele now includes prospective biology and biological chemistry majors, students thinking of medical or graduate school, and students taking biology as a general education course. Among the topics offered have been Building an Animal (developmental biology), Prairie Restoration (ecology), The Language of Neurons (neurophysiology), Biological Responses to Stress (microbial physiology), The Sex Life of Plants (evolution and ecology), Cell Fate: Calvin or Hobbes? (developmental biology), Effects of Climate Change on Organisms (ecology), and What Does it Mean to be a Plant? (physiology). All sections are workshop courses but the arrangement of the six available hours each week differs. Several courses use two three-hour blocks, several others use three two-hour blocks, and one has three, two and one hour blocks. Likewise, there are differences in the details of the courses, but all include significant student-designed projects as a major component. To help standardize the experiences of students across these different sections as well as between the disciplines of the biology and chemistry, the two departments created a manual called Investigations that explains and illustrates in detail how to design experiments, carry out simple statistical tests on data, write a scientific paper, prepare a talk, and create a poster. Where biology and chemistry conventions differ, as in the form of citations, those differences are explicitly noted. An electronic or paper copy of Investigations is available by contacting heitsman@grinnell.edu 

Assessment

Grinnell’s Science Division is conducting several major studies to determine the effectiveness of our research-rich new curricula and how students benefit from a rigorous research. We carried out an extensive assessment program during the first two years of Introduction to Biological Inquiry to determine if the course has successfully met our objectives with the broad range of students who now take the course. This formal assessment has been especially important since, in the first year, the new course did not feel as successful to us as our previous core courses had. In part, this was the result of our failure to help the students buy into the concept of a process-driven rather than a fact-driven course. Students who had been very successful in the fact-based courses offered in their high schools, or who thought they needed to learn facts to do well on the MCAT or GRE exams, were frustrated by our refusal to tell them what they needed to know. The second year we were far more explicit in telling the students why the course was designed as it was and how we hoped they would benefit from it. We also were careful to encourage and reassure them during the semester that they actually were learning a great deal of important biology.

One form of assessment used in the Introduction to Biological Inquiry course is a pretest-posttest diagnostic quiz designed to measure student learning over the course of the semester. The quizzes have three questions corresponding to factual information, data interpretation and research design. Each question is worth 3 points. The descriptive statistics for three sections of Biological Inquiry that focus on microbiology are presented in Table 3. All three categories of questions show significant gains from pretest to posttest, as assessed by related-groups t tests.

Table 3. Mean scores for the diagnostic tests and grades in
Introduction to Biological Inquiry (N = 57).

 
Table 4 presents the results for students from seven sections of Introduction to Biological Inquiry who went on to the next level of biology (Molecules, Cells, and Organisms – the Bio 251 group) compared to students who did not go on (Control). Both the diagnostic test scores and the course grades for the Biological Inquiry course were analyzed. The students who continued into the next course scored significantly higher on the pretest total, the posttest total and grades (Independent groups t tests; p < .05). 

Table 4. Mean scores and grades for Biological Inquiry students who continued to the next biology course (Bio 251) compared to those who did not (control).

These results indicate that all students show a significant improvement in their knowledge base as a result of taking a Biological Inquiry course, and they also improve in their abilities to perform the tasks associated with biological research. It appears, however, that students who were better prepared coming into the course (had higher pretest scores) generally achieved more (had higher posttest scores) and also tended to continue on to further study in biology (enrolled in Biology 251). The proportion of students continuing on in biology was about the same as with the former curriculum, so the new course appeared neither to encourage nor deter students. 

The Second Year Courses 

The next tier of research-based courses was introduced in the 2001-2002 academic year. These two courses, called Molecules, Cells, and Organisms, and Organisms, Ecology, and Evolution, respectively, were designed to create a unified year-long sequence for biology majors (see Table 1). Molecules, Cells, and Organisms requires concurrent registration in Organic Chemistry I and is a required course for both biology and biological chemistry majors. Organisms, Ecology, and Evolution requires at least a semester of calculus in addition to Molecules, Cells, and Organisms as a prerequisite. 

A major theme that carries through both semesters is problem solving, both by organisms themselves and by the scientists who study them. What must organisms do in response to life’s challenges? What must biologists do to understand the structure and function or an organism? Because students enter these courses with a strong background in the process of biology from their Introduction to Biological Inquiry course, these courses focus on the principle concepts of biology using a research-based problem solving approach. The Molecules, Cells, and Organisms course investigates how organisms acquire and expend energy, acquire and transport materials, regulate internal conditions, transmit information, reproduce, develop, grow and move. The Organisms, Ecology, and Evolution course investigates the why of each of these. Both semesters are laboratory and literature intensive.

Unlike the Biological Inquiry classes, the second-level courses have texts that provide facts, so lecture/discussion periods can be used to work through the evidence that supports those facts. Where possible, data from the original seminal papers are used as the basis for discussion. For example, the first major question in Molecules, Cells, and Organisms is “What is the genetic material and how is it maintained and expressed?” The class works through the experiments and results published by Griffith, Avery, MacLeod and McCarty, Chargaff, Hershey and Chase, Watson and Crick, Meselson and Stahl, Okazaki, Jacob and Monod, Benzer and others to develop their understanding of the molecules and processes of the central dogma of molecular biology. They also analyze several very current papers that address important questions being examined today. During this time the lab portion of the course is devoted to creating and analyzing pigmentation mutants in the bacterium Serratia marcescens, analyzing different types of mutants of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus by genetic means and by PCR, and sub-cloning two genes from the pca operon of A. calcoaceticus. Students then use the techniques they have learned to design and carry out projects using either of these experimental organisms and write a formal scientific paper describing their findings.

As a way of unifying the first semester second-tier course (Molecules, Cells, and Organisms) with the second semester course (Organisms, Ecology, and Evolution), the same experimental organisms are used in both courses and data from experiments done in the fall semester are used as preparation for further experiments in the spring. In addition to the two bacteria mentioned above, students use barley and several species of prairie plants and the nematode Cenorhabditis elegans as model systems. As an example of a direct linkage between the two courses, baseline data on the chlorophyll content, photosynthetic rates and respiration rates per unit of leaf area of barley and corn, C3 and C4 plants respectively, are gathered during the first semester when students consider energy metabolism. Students also design and conduct a project using prairie plants that examines the effect of various environmental factors on these parameters. These data are then used in the second semester course when students develop hypotheses regarding the performance of these plants in competition experiments. Similarly, students in the first semester become familiar with C. elegans as an organism in which to study developmental processes such as muscle formation, and in the second semester they use this worm to study muscle physiology. They also use C. elegan to test whether a trait governed by many different alleles is adaptive. In this case, they test the worm’s ability to detect and move toward or away from a particular chemical; the worm racing labs are very popular with students! 

Biological Chemistry and Upper-Level Courses 

Students planning to major in biological chemistry diverge from biology and chemistry majors at the fourth semester by enrolling in Introduction to Biological Chemistry and Organic Chemistry II (see Table 1). The new course, Introduction to Biological Chemistry, has been developed jointly by chemists and biologists to take advantage of the background that students will have in both disciplines. In addition, NSF-AIRE funds have supported a postdoctoral fellow with appointments in both departments who has provided a link between the two departments. The fellow has taught portions of both Introduction to Biological Inquiry and Introduction to Biological Chemistry. Because the fellow has also sat in on the entire semester of these courses and the second tier Molecules, Cells, and Organisms course, she has provided many helpful observations as we continue to shape these offerings. Introduction to Biological Chemistry was first offered in the spring semester 2002 to a mixed class of junior and senior chemistry and biology majors along with the first group of sophomore biological chemistry majors. This time, the course had a fairly conventional structure in order to accommodate the different backgrounds of the students during the transition between the old and new curricula. When the students taking the course all have the inquiry-based biology curriculum, the course will assume a more investigative mode of learning. Similarly, as students from the previous curriculum graduate, upper-level biology courses will change since students in the new major will have better preparation in the processes of biology.

What Have We Learned? Can Others Make Similar Changes?

Nothing reported in this tale is unique to Grinnell College. In the course of developing our own version of a research-rich, inquiry-based biology curriculum, we saw again that cooperation born of mutual respect is essential to any change. We were also reminded that sometimes less can actually be more – in our situation, less content has brought a greater understanding of what biology really is all about. 

Have we succeeded? It is too early to tell, but the experiment is well begun. Nearly all of our students are now asking to participate in student/faculty research projects or are seeking outside research opportunities. The biological chemistry major is drawing increasing numbers of majors and in its fourth year is already larger than the majority of majors at the college. Because such numbers fluctuate year-to-year, it is hard to say with such a small sample if the total number of students majoring in biology, biological chemistry, and chemistry has significantly increased, but it has clearly not decreased. Both biology and chemistry have seen students shifting to the biological chemistry major but neither department has suffered disproportionately. 

Can others make similar changes, even if a large influx of outside money is not available to purchase instrumentation or computers? I believe that the answer is “yes” because it is the approaches rather than the specific experiments that are the important changes to be made. Our NSF-AIRE grant funded a postdoc who bridged the two departments, but regular faculty members can serve many of the same functions. Likewise, the grant funded workshops for activities such as writing the Investigations manual but such curriculum development certainly occurs even without external support. The flexibility of inquiry-based courses allows them to be mounted with the resources available. For example, my students primarily study antibiotic resistance in bacteria using filter paper disc assays on agar plates – it is hardly high tech but it is good science. And good science is what it’s all about. 


The Institution

Grinnell College is a selective private, residential liberal arts college with about 1300 students and 135 faculty located in Grinnell Iowa. Grinnell is located in the bucolic center of Iowa in a town of 9000 that shares its name with the college. Despite its rather isolated location, Grinnell draws its students from every state in the union and from many foreign countries. Essentially all of these students are eighteen to twenty-two years old, attend college full-time, and graduate in eight semesters. The typical semester course load is 16 credits earned by taking four classes. The three academic divisions of the college (Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities) have roughly equal numbers of students. 

Students like to claim that Grinnell College has no requirements, but this is not quite the case. While it is true that there are no college-wide distributional or core course requirements, each student must complete a class called the First-year Tutorial which focuses on writing and oral communication skills and whose professor is the student’s academic advisor for the first two years of college. In addition, each student must complete a formal major that generally includes eight courses in a particular department and several courses in other departments. 

Despite the absence of many formal requirements, numerous unwritten expectations hedge students’ options. For example, students are expected to sample from each of the college’s three academic divisions of the sciences, social studies, and humanities. This distribution is particularly true during the first year when tutorial advisors strongly urge their tutorial students to take a class in each division each semester. Such expectations become de facto requirements when students petition to declare a second major or to study off campus for a semester since permission will not be granted without evidence that the student is undertaking a well-rounded liberal arts education. Other expectations, such as waiting to declare a major until pre-registration for the fifth semester, have no mechanism for enforcement but nonetheless carry the weight of requirements in the Grinnell ethos.


Acknowledgments

The faculty and staff who are making it all happen: Carolyn Bosse, Jonathan Brown, Vince Eckhart, Leslie Greg-Jolly, Kathryn and Peter Jacobson, Sue Kolbe, Clark Lindgren, Kathy Miller, Vida Praitis, Diane Robertson, and Charles Sullivan in Biology; Mark Levandoski, Leslie Lyons, Elaine Marzluss, Martin Minelli, Andrew Mobley, Lee Sharpe, James Swartz, and Elizabeth Trimmer in Chemistry; David Lopatto in Psychology; and Janelle Hare, NSF-AIRE postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Biology and Chemistry. 

Funding to support development of these new curricula has been provided by grants from NSF-AIRE, NSF-CCLI, Howard Hughes Medical Institutes, and Grinnell College’s Fund for Excellence.


Endnote

1. J. P. Gutwill-Wise, 2001, “The Impact of Active and Context-based Learning in Introductory Chemistry Courses: an Early Evaluation of the Modular Approach,” J. Chem. Ed.78:684-690.

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