Meeting Abstract
Many national reports have noted the growing importance of quantitative approaches in biology and encouraged the development of undergraduate curricula that incorporate quantitative methods. The major formal quantitative education that undergraduates receive is through math, stat and computer courses, mostly not linked to the quantitative conceptual foundations useful in biology. Calculus still reigns as often the only math component of undergraduate biology requirements, despite the fact that comprehension of the theoretical underpinnings of biology requires understanding of probability and discrete math. Concepts such as equilibrium and stability are typically not even mentioned in these calculus-oriented courses. There is little connection to observation and data in math courses specifically designed for biology students, so students see these courses as divorced in context from their laboratory and field-oriented biology courses. To supplement quantitative education initiatives such as those in Vision and Change, colleagues and I have developed a pedagogy and text based upon the “rule-of-five” which utilizes a mixture of approaches (symbolic, graphical, numerical, verbal analogy, and data) to relate key concepts accounting for the diverse learning styles of students. I will demonstrate how data on photosynthetic rates is used to build a large portion of standard calculus concepts, how landscape change based on Google Earth is used to encourage hypothesis formulation and testing and allows students to derive the basic rules of matrix multiplication, and discover the relationship between eigenvectors and landscape equilibrium. Computational tools Matlab and R allow students to more readily apply quantitative methods to data, while building comprehension of basic coding that goes beyond the use of a “black-box”.
