The Interdisciplinary Laboratory: An Integration of Chemistry, Biology, and Physics

The Interdisciplinary Laboratory: An Integration of
Chemistry, Biology, and Physics

Gerald R. Van Hecke, Department of Chemistry
Kerry K. Karukstis, Department of Chemistry
F. Sheldon Wettack, Department of Chemistry and Vice President/Dean of Faculty
Catherine S. McFadden, Department of Biology
Richard C. Haskell, Department of Physics

Harvey Mudd College
Claremont, CA 91711

With the receipt of the National Science Foundation’s Award for the Integration of Research and Education, faculty at Harvey Mudd College sought new ways to extend the connection between research and education. In particular, we developed a new and exciting education venture – The Interdisciplinary Laboratory – that infuses the results of faculty/student research into the curriculum and expands the role of research-like experiences in laboratory courses. The faculty who designed the ID Lab viewed the course as an opportunity for students to draw connections between and within technical disciplines, allowing them to see science and engineering as a continuum rather than as a set of discrete boundaries. In addition, they wanted first year students to acquire a common set of laboratory skills and techniques, practice experimental design, and participate in a team experience. The ID Lab was designed to bridge laboratory experiences from biology, chemistry, and physics and to illustrate the commonality of investigative methods and laboratory techniques in these sciences, in addition to introducing discipline-specific principles. The two semester course is team taught by faculty members from the three disciplines, and many of the experiments are derived from faculty research.

The ID Lab was introduced during the 1999-2000 academic year and continues to be offered to 36 students each year. Students substitute the ID Lab for the fall semester General Chemistry Laboratory and the spring semester General Physics Laboratory, which are normally required courses. ID Lab students are concurrently enrolled in separate General Chemistry and General Physics lecture courses. During the spring semester, a small proportion of the students are also enrolled in an Introductory Biology class.

Students were chosen for enrollment in the ID Laboratory on the basis of interest expressed in a questionnaire sent to all incoming students. Only 36 were selected due to limitations of equipment and faculty. Since we view the laboratory as a yearlong course, students are assigned to the laboratory for the fall and spring semesters, and transfers out of the course have not been allowed. While it would be possible to permit students to transfer to a traditional course, the reverse is not allowed because this laboratory is so different from the alternative chemistry and physics labs. We keep the enrollment to an even number to be sure that each student has a partner.

Course Mechanics

The ID Laboratory consists of four three-week long experiments each semester and features an investigative approach focusing on question and/or hypothesis formulation and testing. Two experiments are conducted in parallel by groups of eighteen students, working in pairs. Each student is assigned a different laboratory partner for each experiment, although pre-lab assignments and laboratory reports are completed individually. The laboratory sessions are four hours long, with the first two weeks of each experiment devoted to laboratory work and the third week involving in-class data analysis, data compilation for statistical comparisons, individual laboratory write-up, and oral presentations of results to the class. All procedures, data and analyses are recorded in a bound laboratory notebook. Each pair of students is provided with a laptop computer for real-time data recording and analysis in the laboratory. Students use these same computers to prepare their laboratory reports. Computer data analyses, including graphs, are printed and bound in the laboratory notebook.

Since many of the investigations involve topics and systems that are new to the student and are not discussed in an accompanying lecture course, the in-house laboratory manual provides extensive introductory material for the students. Before each experimental session, students complete a pre-lab exercise available on the course web site and submit their answers to a designated instructor via e-mail prior to laboratory work. The pre-lab exercises are designed to ensure that the student understands the background information necessary to conduct the experiment and to analyze the results. Students are encouraged to submit in writing any remaining questions that they have on the experimental procedure. The instructor may choose to address these questions individually via e-mail or collectively at the start of a laboratory session.

Nature of the Experiments

Tables 1 and 2 list the eight experiments that comprise the fall and spring semester schedules of the ID Lab. As noted above, each experiment was designed to integrate at least two of the disciplines. The background material provided in the laboratory manual helps the students see the role of each discipline in the experiments, and helps students make connections to other fields. By the second semester of the laboratory course, students are generally capable of adequately delineating the chemical, physical and biological concepts involved in a given experiment. However, the faculty have found that early in the course, the students’ awareness of the interdisciplinary nature of an experiment is dramatically enhanced by specific discussion in the laboratory manual and in class.

A brief discussion of the objectives of each experiment follows. Experiments 1, 3, 6, and 7 were drawn directly from the results of HMC faculty research and these experiments provide excellent examples of how faculty research can be integrated into laboratory and classroom activities.

Table 1. Fall Laboratory Schedule
First 6 weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 1. Thermal properties of an ectothermic animal:Are lizards just cylinders with legs?
First 6 weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 2: Molecular weight of macromolecules:Is molecular weight always simple?
Next 6 weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 3: Mechanical resonance of a high-rise building:Are seismic nightmares avoidable?
Next 6 weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 4: Carbonate content of biological hard tissue:Of what are shells composed?

Fall Semester Experiments

In Thermal Properties of an Ectothermic Animal, students discover the importance of the concept of scaling in engineering, physics, chemistry and biology. On the first day of this experiment, students determine the cooling rates of aluminum cylinders of various dimensions and analyze the dependence of such cooling rates on the mass, surface area and volume of these objects. Students enter temperature and time data into laptop computers for analysis by Kaleidagraph and MathCAD software. In the second week, students repeat this procedure using lizards of various sizes collected in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. The analogous analysis of the cooling rates for these two seemingly disparate systems is a startling realization for most students. Students discover that the laws of physics governing heat transfer apply to both inanimate and animate objects - aluminum cylinders and immobilized lizards, respectively. During the third week of the experiment, by pooling the class’ data on the cooling rates of cylinders and lizards of different sizes, students show that the laws of scaling apply to both inanimate and animate objects.

The concept of a distribution is fundamental to science. For example, Gaussian distributions and the Boltzmann distribution are often used in the analysis and interpretation of data. In Molecular Weight of Macromolecules students determine the distribution of molecular weights in populations of both natural and man-made poly-disperse macromolecules. Students physically separate a synthetic polymer (polyvinyl alcohol) into fractions by molecular weight and then employ viscosity measurements to determine the molecular weight and size distribution of the polymer as a whole. They prepare aqueous solutions of the various fractions, and from the measured viscosities of these solutions determine the intrinsic viscosity, from which a viscosity-average molecular weight for each particular fraction is calculated. No two pairs of students prepare the same fractions, and thus the class constructs a molecular weight distribution by sharing data during the write up and analysis session. In addition, the class discusses the dependence of a macromolecule’s physical properties on molecular weight and polydispersity. The laptop computers and MathCAD software enable the students to carry out the calculations and necessary graphical treatment of the data.

While the concept of resonance is a major instructional theme in teaching physics today, the concept clearly has application beyond physics. The prime example of resonance for chemists is nuclear magnetic resonance, while resonant circuits are fundamental to communications and other electronic applications. As the students discover in Mechanical Resonance of a High-Rise Building, resonance is a factor in the transfer of energy in mechanical structures. Students measure the vibrational resonance of a model building and explore the effect of various structural features on the building's resonance response. In the first laboratory session, students construct a high-rise building with aluminum rods and plates mounted on a granite slab. They shake the building with an electric motor and measure the acceleration of the building in a given direction. Using Kaleidagraph software, students plot the acceleration as a function of stimulating frequency to obtain a resonance curve. For the second week of the experiment, students propose a hypothesis to test regarding the mechanical resonance of the model high-rise buildings and an experimental protocol for testing this hypothesis. For example, students might test how the building’s resonance is affected by the number of floors, the floor height, or even the presence of a simulated swimming pool (a pan of water) placed on one of the floors. Students make an oral presentation of their results to the entire class during the final week of the experiment.

Whether two pieces of data are statistically the same is a crucial question in many scientific studies. In Carbonate Content of Biological Hard Tissue, students have the opportunity to explore such statistical inferences as they compare the amounts of calcium carbonate in mineral-containing shells of oysters, hen’s eggs, and the skeletons of reef-building corals. Students employ a simple acid-base titration to determine the carbonate contents. Students pose a question to test such as, "Do eggs of different sizes differ in carbonate content?" or "Do the various calcified structures of different organisms [coral skeleton, mollusk shell, bird egg] differ in carbonate content?" Students use the laptop computers with the MathCAD software package to determine if the average percentages of carbonate content in the various samples are statistically different from one another. During the final week of the experiment, students present their findings to the class, discussing which carbonate sources are similar and which are different, and they suggest chemical, physical, and biological reasons for the differences. This is a case where the formulation of a hypothesis for the origin of any differences has to rely on first answering the question whether statistically significant differences exist.

Table 2. Spring Laboratory Schedule
First 6weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 5: Using digital logic to time a simple pendulum:What makes a good clock?
First 6weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 6: A structure-activity investigation of photosynthetic electron transport:How does a biological system convert physics into chemistry?
Next 6weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 7: Synthesis and characterization of liquid crystals:Or, when are liquids not?
Next 6weeks	Threelab periods	Experiment 8: A genetic map of a bacterial plasmid:Where are the restriction sites located?

Spring Semester Experiments

Periodic time phenomena, including biological clocks, oscillating chemical reactions and pendulums, require some type of clock to measure the period of the phenomenon. In conducting the experiment Using Digital Logic to Time a Simple Pendulum, students learn the basics of digital logic and integrated circuits in order to construct a digital clock to time the period of a pendulum. In the first week, students construct a clock and measure how the pendulum's period depends on the length of the pendulum. They then propose a hypothesis to test in the second week. Students may examine the dependence of the pendulum’s period on such factors as amplitude of swing, weight, or mass to volume ratio of the pendulum bob, etc. In the third week, following data analysis, each student pair presents their hypothesis and results to the class. The laboratory manual includes discussions on periodic behavior in chemical reactions and biological systems to extend the applicability of the resonance concept to the disciplines of chemistry and biology.

From nuclear decay to photosynthesis, numerous examples of rate phenomena with a broad range of time scales occur in our everyday world. In A Structure-Activity Investigation of Photosynthetic Electron Transport, students measure the rate at which electron transport occurs during the process of photosynthesis in spinach chloroplasts. Students use a flashlight to initiate light absorption that triggers the transfer of electrons through the series of naturally occurring electron acceptors, then measure the rate of electron transport to an exogenous (added) acceptor. The spectroscopic assay of electron transport measures the rate of loss of absorption at 600 nm, which is proportional to the rate of electron transfer. Students also test the effectiveness of a set of substituted quinones that serve as models of herbicides that inhibit photosynthetic electron transport. Substituted quinones may bind to a herbicide-binding protein via non-covalent interactions and displace one of the naturally occurring electron acceptors in the electron transport chain. The stronger the non-covalent interactions between inhibitor and binding site, the more effective is the inhibition of electron transport.

Students use the molecular modeling program Molecular Properties Pro to visualize the structure of each of the quinones so they can suggest which structural features may promote and hinder inhibition of electron transport. Based on their first week results, students form a hypothesis as to what substituents and structural features promote inhibition. In the second week they test their hypothesis by using a wider pool of available quinones, including benzoquinones, naphthaquinones, and anthraquinones. In the last week students share their spectroscopic data and their proposed structures for the most effective quinone inhibitor. By correlating quinone structure with inhibitory activity, students can model the herbicide-binding region in plant chloroplasts, suggesting the dimensions of the binding site and the presence of either hydrophobic or hydrophilic regions within the binding pocket.

While the three states of gas, liquid and solid characterize most matter, some liquids are not simple but instead constitute a class, called liquid crystals, whose molecules exhibit order in one or two states. Liquid crystals have immense practical importance in display technology and in living systems. For example, cell membranes can be considered to be a type of liquid crystal. Cholesteric liquid crystals are the basis for many colored liquid crystal displays. The color of such displays depends on the pitch of the helical arrangement of the molecules in the phase. Students measure the pitch of liquid crystalline mixtures in Synthesis and Characterization of Liquid Crystals. Students synthesize and purify cholesteryl nonanoate, a compound known to exhibit a cholesteric liquid crystalline phase. They then form binary mixtures of cholesteryl nonanoate and cholesteryl chloride to generate a known cholesteric (i.e., chiral nematic) liquid crystalline phase. To measure the pitch of the helix formed by the mixture, both the refractive index of the phase and the selective reflection of that phase must be measured. Students complete the cholesteryl nonanoate synthesis and the refractive index measurements of the binary mixture in the first week. In the second class, students measure the selective reflection of their mixture using a spectrophotometer equipped with a variable temperature cell. In the final week the selective reflection and refractive index data are combined to calculate the pitch of the helix as a function of temperature using MathCAD on the laptop computers. Students pool their pitch results to discuss the chemical and physical origin for the dependence of helical pitch on composition and temperature.

The ability to apply chemical techniques to biological systems is critical to understanding structures and fundamental reactions of biological systems. In A Genetic Map of a Bacterial Plasmid students use gel electrophoresis to map the locations of the restriction sites of several different restriction enzymes within a bacterial plasmid DNA molecule. During the first laboratory session, students use restriction enzymes to cleave double-stranded DNA molecules at specific sites, producing DNA fragments of specific size. Given three enzymes, students conduct three single-enzyme restriction digests and three double digestions using the various pair-wise combinations of enzymes. During the second week, gel electrophoresis of the digestion products is completed to determine the size (numbers of base pairs) of the resultant fragments. Class data are pooled to reconstruct the entire plasmid and locate the positions where the enzymes digested or cleaved the DNA molecule. In the course of the experiments students explore the molecular interactions between restriction enzymes and their DNA recognition sequences using the molecular visualization program RasMol installed on the laptop computers.

Student Evaluation of the Course

We use questionnaires to conduct assessments during the course. At the conclusion of an experimental rotation of six weeks, students evaluate the two experiments they had just completed. At the end of the first six weeks in the first semester, a mid-semester course review is conducted. In addition, at the end of each semester the students complete a questionnaire that examines their experience during the entire semester. At the end of the year, a meeting of all students and faculty is held to discuss the whole experience.

Students evaluated their experiences in the ID Lab many times, always with an enthusiastic response to the course. Below are shown the questions asked at the end of the course in 1999-2000, and the two most common student responses to each question, with the number (out of 36) giving this response in brackets.

End of Course Questionnaire

Other student responses reveal the students’ view of their learning experience in the ID Lab. For example, students told us that having some latitude for experimental design stimulated learning. One student reflected, “Many experiments offered an opportunity to create and test one's own hypothesis. [This] allows for creativity and a personal stake in the laboratory activity.” Another had a similar reaction: “I enjoyed coming up with my own experiments and hypotheses. I think this is the kind of immersive learning everyone should experience.” The discovery nature of the experiments was summarized by one student as providing “the feeling that we were discovering and learning together.”

The variety of experiments possible in an interdisciplinary situation is also a factor in promoting student interest and learning. As one student commented, “I really appreciate the variations in the experiments, which the interdisciplinary nature of the course allows. It kept me interested and motivated to spend more time preparing for the lab and to try to really understand the concepts. Also, the work is more challenging than work in other labs (that I’ve taken), and I learned more, so I feel it’s worth my time and energy.” Finally, the connection to faculty research programs is a positive feature: “It was really cool science! I liked being able to form my own hypothesis and decide what to test and also enjoyed when I ended up talking with the faculty about what research the labs came from. Research is so exciting!”

We asked students to state the most important skills that they had learned in ID. Many noted laboratory record-keeping skills, computational skills with the software package MathCAD, and working with a laboratory partner. Others focused on less tangible skills. “I learned many skills in ID Lab, but, most importantly, I learned to draw connections between the many different sciences and conclusions that were relevant to the findings.” “I learned how to approach laboratory from a non-cookie cutter mentality . . . you had to figure out some of it for yourself … I guess I kinda [sic] surprised myself.”

Asked what were the valuable aspects of the course, one student responded it was “Seeing the interaction between the various sciences.” It is clear that the interdisciplinary nature of the experiments contributes to the students' interest and their perception of real-world applicability. One student commented: “I really liked it when I could see the interdisciplinary nature of the experiments. It felt like I was doing something real, not just what every other frosh in every other college was doing.” Another stated that the ID Lab “was a really good chance to be exposed to labs that were very interesting and more ‘real-life’ applicable. It was so valuable to be forced to think about what we know in many areas of science and pull it all together. I feel very well rounded.” Another student said the most valuable aspect was “Being a step ahead of chem/phys/bio class. Doing things that were interesting as opposed to monotonous.” The most challenging? “Dealing with new experimental processes that I had never dealt with.” One student said that the most valuable aspect of the ID lab was “recognizing that all this stuff is somehow connected, even if I can’t say exactly how.”

We asked students in the course to indicate what aspects of the ID Lab they found most challenging. Just as students found the interdisciplinary nature most valuable, one said the most challenging aspect was “combining the varied sciences.” Some cited “working with different lab partners” as their greatest hurdle. One student said, “What was most challenging in ID Lab was to learn how to break down the barriers among the different disciplines because most people apply knowledge from only one particular subject to lab. For example, people get used to making use of only what they learned in chem lecture to chem lab.” Another commented, “I'm beginning to realize that there isn't always a right answer. Also some labs lead to more questions than answers and thus to more refined experiments.” One wrote, “What I found most valuable was also most challenging. Sometimes it was hard to think so critically about certain situations. I really think [the lab] has helped me look at a situation and see that there are so many things going on -- physical, chemical, biological.”

Even when the interdisciplinary nature of the specific experiment was not so obvious, as in the digital clock/pendulum experiment, one student remarked, “I think the applications are more interdisciplinary than the experiment itself.” The recognition that a largely discipline-specific experiment provided skills widely applicable to other disciplines can be taken as a major success of the laboratory.

Perhaps one of the most revealing responses for faculty was expressed as follows: “Lab can be fun when it's interesting.”

Goals Assessment

Working with our Assessment Officer early in the planning of the laboratory, we set forth the goals and paired outcomes appropriate for the course. Tools to assess the specific outcomes have been developed and continue to be improved. Additional information on the course assessment can be found in the appendix.

An important goal of the laboratory is to better instruct students on how to approach data, formulate hypotheses, and subsequently design experiments to test the hypotheses. To this end, we designed an assessment exercise that was administered to all students in the ID Lab and those in the laboratory course associated with the spring semester General Chemistry (Chemistry 26) course. Since all ID Lab students were simultaneously enrolled in the lecture portion of Chemistry 26 during this semester, these two groups were comparable. The exercise provided the student with some data and asked the student to present a data analysis and form a possible hypothesis to test. For each of the first three years of the course, the exercise was analyzed by an expert outside of the ID faculty, a biology faculty member from Pomona College. The results supported the premise that the ID Lab encouraged greater higher thinking skills in comparison to the normal laboratory sequence. While there were no significant differences between students in the ID Lab sequence and in the traditional laboratory sequence in their ability to state a hypothesis to test, ID Lab students proposed a greater variety of hypotheses to test, exhibited a greater ability to design experiments that would adequately test their hypotheses and greater creativity in their experimental design and analysis of results. In evaluating the data provided in the exercise, ID Lab students were consistently able to cite more potential sources of experimental error.

Some of the differences in performance between the ID Lab and the traditional lab students may result from the self-selection of students for the ID Lab, a choice that attracts those students inclined toward interdisciplinary approaches to problems. Nevertheless, we are convinced of the merits of both the integrative and investigative nature of our approach, and thus since the 2002-2003 academic year, we are including one ID Lab experiment in each semester of the traditional General Chemistry laboratory to provide all students with an opportunity for investigative and interdisciplinary learning. The impact of the ID Laboratory on our students’ undergraduate research performance will be a future question to address, as students in ID Laboratory undertake senior research theses.

Advice to Others

For those interested in developing their own ID Laboratory, we recommend building on the expertise and interest of your own faculty. Laboratory topics should be chosen so they benefit from the enthusiasm that derives naturally from the faculty’s interest and expertise in specific areas of research. Students reported that the enthusiasm of the teaching faculty was an important factor contributing to the success of the laboratory. Additional experiments should be developed and substituted on a rotating basis to maintain the innovative character of the course.

The costs of establishing this laboratory, while not insignificant, were not enormous. The AIRE funds helped but two other factors played important roles. We started with a good equipment base and built experiments around available equipment or equipment that we could buy with available funds. The number of major pieces of equipment available determined the initial size of the laboratory. Equipment already on hand included pH meters, Abbe refractometers, spectrophotometers, and typical laboratory equipment such as glassware, stiring hotplates, oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, etc. We had to augment our supply of micropipettes and gel electrophoresis units and we had some equipment made in our shop. The practical approach to this laboratory is to start small and build on existing equipment. After all, the important aspect of this laboratory is that it is an open-ended, multi-week approach that gives pairs of students a research-like experience. It is important to recognize that the experience of the laboratory, not the content, is its strongest point.

A second factor that helped control costs was cost sharing the purchases of equipment with the departments involved. For example, the cost of the laptop computers was shared between AIRE funds and chemistry department funds. In this manner the chemistry department gained access to the laptop computers when not needed by ID lab. Because the ID Laboratory shifted frequently between different lab spaces, the availability of laptop computers was a great boon. It should be pointed out that these computers were not networked and students used only the programs installed on the computers. This in many ways was a blessing, as it focused the students’ attention on developing expertise with the selected software without the distractions of other programs. Institutions that have facilities to support an ID laboratory that operates from a permanent location would be able to use desktop computers.

This course was developed by a small core of committed faculty with the support of the three participating departments and our vice president/dean of faculty. Four faculty members met with the vice president/dean of faculty once a week for a semester to design a set of experiments to test in the following summer with a team of eight undergraduates. This planning time was crucial to the efficient use of the summer. The summer student assistants would be an important consideration for anyone developing such a laboratory. We should point out that, for the faculty, planning during the school term was an add-on, not release time. Faculty champions in each of the three departments made it easier than expected to gain departmental cooperation to substitute the ID lab for other courses and to obtain teaching faculty for the new course. An important selling point was that the laboratory was a pilot program. Even the issue of substitution of ID lab for traditional labs was not a hard sell, given the realization that our current laboratories tend to emphasize development of logical thinking in the laboratory, the application of the scientific method, and careful record keeping. These principles could be learned from any experimental effort and the loss of specific techniques typical of discipline specific experiments was not viewed as so terrible in light of the larger goals of all our first year laboratory experiences.

Sustainability of the Course

Whether the ID Lab should be expanded to be the first laboratory for all students is currently a subject of debate. Some argue that the experience is so beneficial that all students should share it. Others argue that the reason the course is so enthusiastically received is that the selected students feel privileged to be in such a unique laboratory course Students are perhaps the strongest advocates for restricting ID Lab enrollment only to those students interested in participating. They argue that the quality of the team effort would deteriorate if students not committed to an interdisciplinary approach were enrolled. Currently more than half of our incoming students request placement in the ID Lab, three times the number that we can manage at this time. It is not clear what the final outcome of this discussion will be, but no one questions the desirability and effectiveness of the laboratory.

From the start we recognized that teaching outside of one's own discipline would be the most challenging aspect of the course for faculty. To address this concern for those considering participating in this course, we held weeklong training workshops that allowed faculty to conduct the experiments themselves to gain familiarity and experience. By conducting these workshops during the week after commencement, faculty were relaxed enough to focus solely on the ID Lab experience. These workshops typically involved discussion of the experiments in the morning and hands-on experimentation in the afternoon. Participants were given choices of which experiments to try. Subsequent workshops during the next few years should add to the faculty that can rotate through the course and permit expansion of the course to multiple laboratory sections. Participants in these workshops have included mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and economists. Engaging these faculty members in the ID Lab experience has broadened the community’s understanding of the course, offered us fresh perspectives on interdisciplinary connections within these experiments and generated ideas for new experiments.

We anticipate that continued faculty workshops will generate an ever-increasing interest in the laboratory and foster wider use of this laboratory concept. Not only can we hope that our interdisciplinary approach might spread to other laboratory programs, but that lecture courses will incorporate more interdisciplinary topics and discussions. Even those departments not traditionally engaged in laboratory courses have initiated discussions to create ID Labs that combine disciplines. We view such activity as the ultimate measure of success for our new venture at integrating research and education.

The Institution

Harvey Mudd College is a small private undergraduate institution of science and engineering with a substantial curriculum in the humanities and social sciences. The College was founded in 1955 and is a member of the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five distinctive undergraduate colleges and two graduate schools. Our membership in the Claremont consortium affords students numerous academic and social opportunities beyond our campus.

Since its inception in 1955, Harvey Mudd has offered major programs in chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and physics. Two additional majors – biology and computer science – awarded their first degrees in 1992. Our curriculum emphasizes breadth in science and engineering with a strong commitment to studies in the humanities and social sciences. To fulfill our mission to educate scientists, engineers, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas, the curriculum features a Common Core of technical courses in the first two years. The core curriculum required of all students includes two semesters of chemistry (and accompanying laboratory), three semesters of physics (including electricity and magnetism and accompanying laboratory), four semesters of mathematics (single and multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations), a semester each of computer science and biology, and twelve courses in the humanities and social sciences satisfying distributive and concentration requirements. This structured foundation provides not only a common technical background for advanced level courses but also builds a solid foundation across disciplines.

Research has been central to a Harvey Mudd College undergraduate education since the college’s beginning in 1957. Founding President Joseph Platt, a research physicist, and the first faculty member Arthur Campbell, a noted chemistry educator, merged their strengths to create a unique vision of learning science and engineering through the actual practice of these disciplines in conducting basic and applied research. With this vision, Harvey Mudd recruits faculty who are both dedicated educators and researchers, and provides the resources for these faculty to involve undergraduates in significant research programs throughout the academic year and summer months. This collaboration serves an educational purpose for the undergraduate and allows professional growth for the faculty member. The vested interest in the research experience on the part of both the student and the faculty mentor - the integration of research and education - is a key factor in the success of our undergraduate research program.

Today the founders’ vision of the synergy between research and education pervades the Harvey Mudd curriculum:

The integration of research and education confers real benefits on Harvey Mudd College and its students. For students intending to pursue research careers, their undergraduate research experience constitutes pre-professional training in which they develop skills and knowledge that prepare them for graduate training. But how does a research experience serve all students? From a practical standpoint, research plays an essential role in teaching students how to do, not just know about, science and engineering. All participants learn how to find, evaluate, and synthesize information, how to plan and organize, and how to systematically trouble-shoot and deal with set-backs. Students learn the importance of details and record-keeping. They learn to be critical of their own work and to question their results, and thereby learn to be better critics of others’ work. Harvey Mudd research students also develop professional communication skills, both written and oral. They learn that science is a human enterprise and that scientific knowledge extends beyond the realm of professors, textbooks and journal articles. Finally, research instills confidence and creativity as students become experts on their research problems. For all of these reasons, the College believes that undergraduate research contributes significantly to our learning environment.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this effort was provided by a National Science Foundation Award for the Integration of Research and Education (AIRE) to Harvey Mudd College and is gratefully acknowledged. A team of students (Andrew Cosand, Kat Winner, Matt Burden, Katherine Roth, Annie Tran, John Staroba, Marja Fox, and Vanessa Szostaka) and the authoring faculty designed and tested the experiments for this course, and we recognize the integral contributions of all. The success of this venture also depended on the cooperation of many additional faculty colleagues in course design, laboratory instruction and workshop participation, and we thank all who have participated. We also credit the Harvey Mudd undergraduates in the pilot sections of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for their interest, enthusiasm, and constructive comments that contributed immensely to the success of this educational venture. We gratefully acknowledge the vital assistance to our course assessment efforts of Dr. Karen A. Yoshino, former Executive Assistant to the President for Institutional Research and Assessment at Harvey Mudd College, and Dr. Gene S. Fowler, Associate Professor of Biology at Pomona College.

Appendix

Interdisciplinary First Year Laboratory Assessment

Our first year interdisciplinary laboratory replaces Harvey Mudd College’s traditional method of introducing students to discipline-specific and structured content-centered laboratory experiments with interdisciplinary laboratory experiences. Implicit in the correlated goals and outcome statements given below is a larger goal - helping students develop the ability to think as scientists. Achieving this goal requires efforts far beyond the traditional skills of memorization, recollection and following of directions. The skills required are higher-order thinking skills.

Goals	Outcomes
Promote the excitement and practice of laboratory science with experiments that illustrate the blending of disciplines in real world problems	Students will learn the commonality of science while recognizing discipline specific branches.
Promote the excitement and practice of laboratory science by investigative experiments that develop problem formulation skills	Students will confidently explore new areas of scientific study. Students will retain new concepts better since they can relate to real problems.
Promote the excitement and practice of laboratory science with experiments that vary in disciplinary perspective and content.	Students will recognize how discipline specific principles can be quite similar but applied and interpreted differently.
Introduce experimental protocols, laboratory, computational, communication, and computer skills.	Students will be able to communicate effectively across disciplines.

Assessment of the learning goals is conducted through two methods: a post-experiment questionnaire and two post-course instruments, a questionnaire and a post-course exercise. The combination of assessments covers not only each of the specific goals as well as the larger goals, but also the critical question: Is an interdisciplinary approach better than a traditional approach?

Post-experiment assessment

After the completion of a pair of laboratory experiments, students are given time in class to respond to a post-experiment questionnaire shown below.

Post-experiment questions
1. How do you think the interdisciplinarity of the lab itself could be improved?
2. What did you most enjoy, or find most rewarding, about this experiment?
3. What did you least enjoy, or find least rewarding, about this experiment?
4. What would you change about the lab? What would you keep the same?
5. Please rate the following items on the extent to which this investigation improved your skills
(1 = not improved to 5 = greatly improved), and comment on how.
a) collecting and recording scientific data
b) formulating and testing a scientific question
c) analyzing and interpreting data
d) communicating scientific results to others
e) working with a partner

Post-course assessment

The challenge of developing an assessment for the ID laboratory is in determining whether interdisciplinary learning increases students’ ability to grasp higher-order thinking skills to a greater extent than traditional single-discipline learning. This assessment was conducted two ways: by a post-course questionnaire and a post-course exercise. The post-course questions shown below were answered by students in a class meeting during the last week of classes while no other experimental work was conducted.

Post-course questions
1. What was effective in promoting your learning in this course?
2. What was not conducive to learning in this laboratory?
3. What could instructors have done differently to promote your learning?
4. What could you have done differently to promote your learning?
5. What are the most important skills you learned in ID lab?
6. What aspect(s) of the ID lab did you find most valuable?
7. What aspect(s) of the ID lab did you find most challenging?
8. How has your experience in the ID lab helped you to grow as an experimentalist? For example, did your concepts of scientific investigation change or become clearer?
9. Would you recommend ID laboratory to an incoming student? Why or why not?

An important goal of the laboratory was to better instruct students on how to approach data, formulate hypotheses, and subsequently design experiments to test the posed hypotheses, a goal that leads to the crucial question of whether the ID lab experience was better than the traditional lab experience. To this end the post-course assessment exercise was designed and administered to all students in the spring semester Chemistry 26 (General Chemistry) laboratory, a course in which all ID Lab students were simultaneously enrolled during this semester. The exercise was administered in class at the time of the final experiment of the Chemistry 26 course. Students were given a short description of the osmoregulatory behavior of the protozoan paramecium, and one page of data collected for a short experiment. Neither prior exposure to the nature of the organism nor enrollment in a biology course was expected. Students were asked to read the material before the next laboratory meeting a week later. At that laboratory session, students were given a series of questions to answer. These questions are listed below. The nature of the exercise was for the student, given some data, to present a data analysis and form a possible hypothesis to test that analysis.

Post-Course Exercise Questions

1. From the data shown, what can you conclude about the effect of solute concentration on contractile vacuole pulse rate.
2. In what way(s) would you analyze the data to support your conclusion?
3. a) What are the main sources of experimental uncertainty in this study? b) How would you estimate those uncertainties?
4. Suppose you were going to have the chance to continue this study in the following lab period. What would you do? a) State the hypothesis you would test. b) Outline a brief protocol you would follow to test your hypothesis. c) How would you analyze and present your data?
5. On a scale of 1-10, how difficult did you find this task? Please explain your rating.

A biology faculty member at Pomona College read the responses of the students without knowing the identity of those students who were concurrently enrolled in the ID Laboratory. Numerical scores on a scale of 1-5 were assigned to the student responses to each question. Average answers were scaled as three, and superior and inferior responses were scaled accordingly. For question 3a, the number of experimental sources of error cited was also noted. Question 4 was evaluated as to whether a true hypothesis was posed (rather than simply stating a question) and whether students simply repeated their original conclusion (Question 1) as the new hypothesis to test. In addition, two subjective scores were assigned for the overall sophistication of the responses and for the creativity in analysis and design of investigations. ID Lab students were then identified after the scoring was complete. Overall summaries and pair wise comparisons of scores for ID Lab students and non-ID Lab students were made, including pooled-variance T-tests of differences between means.