Students in three different physiology courses are engaged in inquiry-based learning in the laboratory using computer-aided data acquisition equipment. Allied health science majors taking Human Anatomy and Physiology, biology majors taking Comparative Vertebrate Physiology, and pre-professional students taking Human Biology are reading the primary literature of these respective disciplines and applying what they learn to solve problems in the laboratory. Beginning students solve problems presented to them by the instructors, and more advanced students design their own experiments. At the end of each laboratory period, students are presenting the results of their experiments to each other. Students also share their data on a central server, enabling them to work together at interpreting their results and writing their reports outside the normal class meeting times. The intellectual merit of this project is found in the pedagogy, which is an innovative adaptation of a similar approach used at San Diego State University. This pedagogy has been shown to increase student interest in both physiology content and physiological research. The broader impacts of this project include over 300 students each year, most of them women or students from traditionally underrepresented groups, who are taking advantage of the new equipment in these physiology courses to address open-ended, inquiry-driven laboratory experiments. The newly developed curricula in these courses are being shared with instructors of similar courses from area colleges and universities at an annual summer pedagogy workshop. In addition, laboratory curricula developed with this grant are being made available world wide on a website dedicated to innovative physiology laboratory approaches (www.powerlab-teaching.com/experiments/contributions.html).
