This award provides funds to the Department of Biology at New Mexico State university to help purchase equipment to be used in a new, independent, year-long physiology laboratory course. It will replace existing laboratories in animal and cell physiology, will initiate laboratory teaching of microbial and plant physiology, and will supplement existing lecture courses in animal, plant, microbial, and cellular physiology, and in endocrinology and neurophysiology. The course will, however, be neither subsidiary to nor dependent on lecture courses. Instead, students will hold a 75-minute Tutorial and Planning workshop where they will: (1) present briefings on principles, using abbreviated written material; (2) confront live material or published information that poses a problem; (3) formulate testable hypothesis that use representative methods and instruments on hand; (4) review previous results in preparation for formal report writing. Later that week students will convene in an open-ended laboratory where teams will learn necessary techniques and test their own hypothesis. Students will not "cookbook" nor know expected results. The unity of experimental approaches across disciplines and the similarity of problems faced by organisms across levels of organization and phylogenetic disciplines will be stressed. Digital data acquisition and logging will be used throughout. The grantee is matching this award with non-Federal sources.
