One of the primary instructional responsibilities of any physics department is to teach basic physics to students who are pursuing majors in the life sciences. However, the course sequence offered to life science students is typically not designed to serve their needs but is rather a version (often watered-down) of one designed to serve the needs of physics, mathematics, and engineering students. As noted in the BIO2010 report of the National Research Council, the basic physics knowledge needed to build an understanding of biology is often absent from such courses or may not be covered in depth.
This project at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill addresses this concern directly, providing life-science students with a physics course designed with their discipline in mind, using the research-validated pedagogical techniques of the lecture/studio model to maximize student engagement. The project is creating an introductory course sequence for life science majors with content and pedagogy designed to improve the students' grasp of physics concepts and their understanding of the concepts' relevance to biology, as well as to improve their ability to apply those concepts to the solution of complex problems. This partnership between the Physics & Astronomy and Biology Departments adopts a "how things work" approach and a lecture/studio model for the courses, in which each unit begins with a biological "driving question" and incorporates the physics concepts necessary to understand it.
Another goal of this work is the development of the local learning community of instructors to foster the use of research-based pedagogies in large introductory science classes in physics and biology. This collaboration across disciplines in teaching leads to improvement in the effectiveness of the instructors' teaching in other courses, and provides a model for interdisciplinary collaborations for pedagogical reforms for other institutions.
