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“They didn't know what they were getting into when they arrived last fall,” Morkin recalls with a smile on an early February morning. She bounds around the room, stopping occasionally to check in with students and their tablemates as they study data sets on the freezing and boiling points of solutions with differing concentrations and under different pressures. They need to figure out, from the data she gave them, which formulas can be used to come up with the numbers. “It's an inversion of the typical way of doing things,” says Morkin. The room buzzes as they puzzle through the problem. Finally, she asks a student to step up to a whiteboard. With Morkin's coaching and input from other students, he lays out the equations from which the freezing and boiling points had been derived.
Such nontraditional, active-learning approaches to introductory science and math courses are being tried at other colleges as well, among them North Carolina State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Morkin's students are delighted to be the first at their school to experience the alternative to a standard lecture-style course. Sitting in a lounge after class, freshman Amol Koldhekar says, “If you talk to people taking the regular chemistry class, they get the right answers, but they don't understand it. They plug 'n chug,” putting numbers into memorized equations without knowing where those equations come from.
Fellow freshman Remy Weinberger agrees. “In this class,” he says, “you have to understand the theory behind the formulas so you can derive them yourself and know how to use them.”
Like most of their classmates, they want to attend medical school or pursue a career in another health care or biomedical science field. Morkin designed her chemistry course to give them a running start in acquiring the quantitative, problem-solving, and interdisciplinary scientific skills they will need.
Recent reports showing an ever-increasing need for biomedical scientists with stronger math skills and a yawning gap between the need and the preparation being offered. So, Emory and a growing number of other academic institutions are experimenting, even at the precollege level, with new ways to integrate quantitative reasoning into the traditional biological sciences curriculum.
Putting more mathematics into biology and related courses, though, is not a simple matter of adding statistics, calculus, and computer science to already challenging subjects. It requires changing minds about the importance of such skills in a field that historically shortchanged them and revamping longstanding attitudes about how to educate future biomedical scientists.
Many teachers and students question the need for change. “There's an uphill battle,” attests Emory neuroscientist Ronald Calabrese. “I've heard faculty members at department meetings say, 'Why do premed students need differential calculus? They're going to medical school!'”
His colleague Dieter Jaeger notes that resistance among students is also a factor. “You have to convince them,” he says, “that it's more than just making biology harder.”
In fact, even though some students might never need to derive an equation in their biomedical careers, studying math contributes significantly to those careers. A recent study of 8,500 students at 77 U.S. colleges and universities showed that the stronger a student's high school preparation in math, the better he or she is likely to do not only in chemistry and physics but also in biology. Writing in Science last July, the study's authors—Philip M. Sadler, director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Robert H. Tai, a professor of science education at the University of Virginia—described “more advanced study of mathematics in high school” as one of the “pillars supporting college science.”
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