Physical science majors at UCLA have deceased monotonically for 20 years. The UCLA Science Challenge has accepted as its mission four goals: 1) retain current science majors, 2) recruit new science majors, 3) attract minority students to science, and 4) improve student attitudes toward science. UCLA serves an unusually diverse student body chosen from the top 12.5% of California high school graduates. Every student enters qualified to major in science. The six departments that comprise the UCLA Science Challenge, Astronomy, Atmospheric Science, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Space Science, Mathematics, and Physics, taught approximately 6000 undergraduate students in lower-division courses last year. More than 20% of these students are Black or Hispanic. We have the student contact; we have an awesome opportunity. We have focused on lower-division courses and laboratories, and we have experimented with methods. We find that interactive, computer- based materials provide the most effective and the most popular laboratory instruction. Interactive seminars and discussion sessions, which have students at a computer terminal, have proved exceptionally effective in teaching. Computationally intensive demonstration programs created at UCLA have generated excitement in lectures. We are now converting these demonstration programs to interactive student programs. Using these experiences, we developed and implemented three new prototype courses in Astronomy, Atmospheric Science, and Chemistry using interactive program modules. Student response exceeded our wildest hopes. Cognitive Psychology evaluates our teaching effectiveness and assesses student attitudes. We now are now radically overhauling our lower-division science based on the creation of 11 new courses and 18 new interdisciplinary laboratory modules.
