Students majoring in non-STEM fields often identify introductory biology courses as irrelevant and overly rigorous. Resistance to enroll in a required general education science course, coupled with negative attitudes toward the subject, can adversely affect the academic performance of students; this can especially be present in students from…

Pigments, dyes, and transition-metal compounds are made in courses across the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, but student characterization of these compounds' most striking features, their colors, seldom goes beyond verbal descriptions. Affordable, hand-held, fiber-optic reflectance spectrophotometers make it possible to advance students'…

With the rapidly growing field of nanotechnology, there has been a pressing need to teach non-science undergraduate majors how to critically interpret science in popular media and news sources. The present work introduces students to chemistry concepts through the lens of relatable nanotechnology applications, including electronics, medicine,…

The combined lab and lecture course is designed around the themes of colorants (dyestuffs and pigments) and fibers (natural and human-made) for nonscience majors. Students dye natural and synthetic fibers with natural dyes such as turmeric, raspberries, tea, and cochineal insects as well as synthetic dyes. The students observe the colorfast…

St. Olaf College recently restructured its Summer Bridge Program (SBP) course for incoming low-income (LI) and first-generation (FG) college students from a non-major biology course, "Issues in Biology," to an interdisciplinary "Explorations in Science" course. Two significant changes were made with the intention of giving…

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…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…

A central goal of nonmajors chemistry courses is to instill within students the sense that chemistry does not occur in a vacuum but rather permeates everyday life. To encourage students to consider chemistry within the broader context of society and public policy, a week-long module in a survey course for nonmajors was designed to connect…

Recognition of the value of a scientifically literate citizenry has driven American science education reform since the 1950s. We have seen some improvement in the comprehension of science facts in the past 10-20 years, but far less improvement in Americans' understanding of the nature of science. College science courses are ideal venues for…

In this paper we describe an interdisciplinary course on dynamics that is appropriate for nonscience majors. This course introduces ideas about mathematical modeling using examples based on pendulums, chemical kinetics, and population dynamics. The unique emphasis for a nonmajors course is on chemical reactions as dynamical systems that do more…

A course linking chemistry and archaeology was designed to introduce scientific principles and applications to students with little or no science background. The course could provide students an opportunity to explore the role of the sciences in archaeology and to discover the relationship between materials and the culture that produce them.

A proposed course featuring the teaching of chemistry to nonscience majors in the context of detective fiction is described. (MSE)

Describes a college reform effort that includes the development of a college science course for nonscience majors. The main goal of the course is to advocate the interdisciplinary nature of all sciences and to involve the students actively in the discovery process as a way of learning science. (ZWH)

Describes a course that explores the ways in which geology can have an underlying influence on human events that is much deeper and more subtle than the distribution of resource wealth and geologic hazards. The course revolves around a series of geological topics that have direct relevance to particular prehistoric, historical, political, or…

Two linked courses examining conservation science and art history of 17th-century Dutch painting are described. The two courses have been taught on campus and, most recently, as study-abroad courses in collaboration with the Center for European Studies, Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands. The highly interdisciplinary courses are intense, yet…