The college, a 4-year liberal-arts college for women with a 28-percent minority student population, is expanding and enhancing laboratory and field experiences in four middle- to upper-level biology courses (Ecology, Organismal Biology of Animals, Organismal Biology of Plants, and Animal Behavior) through the acquisition of scientific and computer equipment and through the creation of a field research site on the campus. The project provides students from sophomore through senior level with a focused, hands-on, and realistic (in terms of needed scientific skills) continuum of undergraduate research experiences in organismic biology. Through this project, a discovery-based, or constructivist, approach to laboratory experimentation and system observations is implemented. Within a single laboratory period, students are able to test and retest their scientific hypotheses, discovering through active investigation which of their hypotheses are correct or incorrect. The high-tech instrumentation is important because it allows students to discover both the capabilities and, just as important, the limitations of technology. New equipment includes field sampling equipment for terrestrial, aquatic, and laboratory systems of study; data-logging devices for short- and long-term data acquisition; and four mixed-platform computers (two desktop and two portable) with associated hardware and software. This equipment allows the incorporation of expanded and improved exploratory research experiences (field and laboratory), data-acquisition techniques (short and long term), data interpretation (mathematical and graphical), mathematical and simulation model construction, and validation of models using student-collected field data. As part of its institutional commitment to this project, the college is establishing a field research site. *
