Meeting Abstract
The Department of Biological Sciences at University of Mary Washington has greatly modified our curriculum to meet the recommendations proscribed in the AAAS report, “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education.” Our most significant changes have been to include authentic research experiences throughout the core curriculum and to require completion of one of several new “Research Intensive” (RI) courses, each based on a different biological subdiscipline. The RI courses share common learning objectives concerning experimental design, data analysis, and scientific communication, but differ in content-specific objectives. I recently converted a traditional comparative endocrinology to an RI course, “Research in Endocrinology.” After a primer on general endocrinology principles and methods, students shifted focus to more deeply examine the stress hormone axis through primary literature. Students then designed, conducted, and analyzed experiments to test their hypotheses on some aspect of the stress axis or stress response, using zebrafish as a model organism. Finally, students wrote journal article-style manuscripts and delivered oral or poster presentations of their studies. I will discuss details of this course model, as well as both the benefits and challenges of this shift in course emphasis from content to process.
