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The department held a retreat to talk about what a new introductory laboratory should accomplish. Faculty members hoped to retain a broad focus on biology but to do so more effectively. They therefore dropped the number of laboratory exercises from 12 to 4 — one each on ecology, biochemistry, molecular genetics, and neurobiology. "People are amazed when they find out how few labs we do," Hamlett says. "But as soon as we tried it, we were convinced that students were learning a lot more biology." In the new laboratory the students spend a week learning about the subject of each exercise and choosing a scientific question to investigate. They spend another week gathering data and then two weeks analyzing data, refining their experiments, and writing up the results. After working with a writing consultant to revise the first draft, each student turns in a paper that closely resembles a journal article. As in the classroom, trading quantity for quality raises the question of whether a laboratory is covering enough material. But faculty members who teach the course insist that greater understanding serves students better than exhaustive coverage. "Maybe our students won't have experienced all of the techniques that people elsewhere do," says associate professor Catherine McFadden, who teaches an ecology laboratory in which students gather data on organisms at Laguna Beach. "But they'll be more flexible and will understand more about how science is done." Certainly the record of Harvey Mudd's biology majors reflects the department's confidence: in the past few years, about half the biology majors have gone to biology graduate school. The students are as enthusiastic as the faculty members. "The other labs I've taken here were like the labs I had in high school," says junior Phil Cheung. "That was before I came to biology lab. Here you're actually working the same way that scientists work. In other labs you turn in your laboratory notebook and say good-bye."
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The majority of the elementary education students who take Biology 295 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln claim to "hate science" before the course begins. But the course, which uses hands-on projects like the one shown here to help future teachers overcome their fear of science and engage young students in investigative learning, has a dramatic impact on student attitudes. By the end of the course, 95 percent of the students claim to enjoy science. Broadening the horizons of pre-meds Johns Hopkins University has developed one remedy: an annual seminar series that introduces undergraduates to other career options. Shin Lin, associate dean for research and graduate studies and chair of the biophysics department, hosts the popular sessions like a talk show. Recent guests included AIDS researcher Flossie Wong-Staal, ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, geneticist Victor McKusick, and Merck structural biologist Paula Fitzgerald. The series is so popular, often attracting 200 or more students, that Lin had to move it to a campus auditorium. "I'm the Jay Leno of science," he jokes.
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he routes that institutions take in making the transition from traditional
to investigative laboratories are as varied as the outcomes. Harvey Mudd
College in Claremont, California — traditionally a physical sciences and
engineering powerhouse — had a chance to make the transition when it upgraded
its biology department and began to offer a biology major in the late 1980s.
The introductory biology laboratory that existed at that school then had
not changed in years. "It was pretty much a cookbook approach,"
says biology professor Nancy Hamlett. "We measured bacterial growth
rates. We did enzyme kinetics. But when you talked to students later, they
didn't seem to internalize anything. Nothing seemed to sink in."
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