This paper highlights the design process and implementation for an "all majors" undergraduate course that allows students a chance to reconnect with the natural world. During this course students explore a wide range of biological and physical science based topics that seek to highlight human intervention and our impacts on the planet.…

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) significantly enhance the outcomes of students who participate. Unfortunately, students may face barriers to engaging in UREs, which creates challenges for students' development of essential research skills that may not be covered thoroughly in laboratory classes. Overall, there is a need for a curriculum…

Interdisciplinary education offers a collaborative approach to multifaceted topics, such as environmental sustainability. In this article, we present the conceptual framework and lessons learned from a team-taught course, entitled Sustainability, Energy, and the Green Economy (SEGE). Faculty from the departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology…

This article details the aim, development, and implementation of the Chemistry-Genetics Course Collaborative (CGCC), a cotaught offering of a human genetics course with an honors introductory chemistry course. The CGCC was formed to fully integrate the two courses, along with the associated chemistry lab, to create an interdisciplinary scientific…

Introductory science courses play a critical role in the recruitment and retention of undergraduate science majors. In particular, first-year courses are opportunities to engage students in scientific practices and motivate them to consider scientific careers. We developed an introductory course using a semester-long series of established…

The most challenging global problems of our age involve coupled human--environmental systems within the Food-Energy-Water Nexus. The undergraduate students currently in our classrooms will be tomorrow's global citizens, each of whom must be prepared to understand and reason about these challenges and ultimately make decisions about them in a…

This article presents a case study regarding healthy weight loss and the role of the hormone ghrelin in maintaining a lower body weight. This study was designed specifically for use in an introductory college-level physiology course. It addresses the use of the case study in teaching digestion and metabolism, exploring the role of hormones in…

Traditional lecturing has been shown again and again to be a less effective teaching method regarding student engagement and promotion in the sciences. Studies that compare different teaching methods often face limitations because, over time, courses are either substantially changed and/or are taught by different instructors. This article presents…

We describe a third-year undergraduate course that focuses on multiscale modeling and protein folding and has as its primary goal the encouragement of students to integrate thinking across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. The ability to perform innovative and successful research work in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)…

We designed a physics course for prospective elementary and middle school teachers to foster aspects of scientific thinking recommended in reform documents. Because the elementary school curriculum focuses heavily on literacy, we also explicitly integrated physics and literacy learning in this course. By integrating physics and literacy learning,…

Writing has an important role in science education and practice. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary collaboration between English rhetoric studies and biology, seemingly disparate disciplines, we describe a model for a scientific writing and communication course. The goals of the course were to prepare students for science-oriented careers, as well…

Although the majority of the teaching faculty at U.S. universities is composed of people who are scientific experts, research has found that most scientists do not have information about effective teaching methods (DeHaan 2005). Traditional lecture-style college science teaching does not reflect knowledge about best teaching practices based upon…

This article describes an approach to minimizing the "fear factor" in a chemistry course for the nonscience major, and also addresses relevant applications to other science courses, including biology, geology, and physics. The approach emphasizes forensic science and affords students the opportunity to hone their analytical skills in an…

Case studies challenge students to think, to process ideas at a higher and more complex cognitive level, and to experience science as a process rather than as a collection of facts. This article describes an introductory biology course sequence that makes regular and frequent use of case studies, which the author has found has synergistic…

Examines the educational benefits of an experimental project approach to students taking the last course of an introductory biology sequence. Educational benefits were defined in terms of analytical skills, knowledge of basic statistics, and experience with scientific writing. The study was viewed as a preliminary investigation, but one that…