9451037 Ybarrondo Adams State College is located in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and serves a primarily rural area with a high minority (i.e., Hispanic) population. Because of the isolated location of ASC, the educational opportunities offered by the Department of Biology are primarily restricted to those which can be accommodated with limited on-campus facilities and equipment. While a program in field and environmental biology has traditionally been strong at ASC, undergraduate experiences in modern "bench" biology have been constrained by a lack of essential instrumentation. This is particularly true in upper division laboratory courses to be impacted by the equipment proposed herein, including: Comparative Animal Physiology, Cell Biology/Genetics Laboratory, Immunology, and Molecular Biology where currently many procedures/experimental approaches can only be described and "hands-on" experience is inadequate or lacking altogether. The instrumentation requested in this proposal will be enormously productive in terms of enhancing the ability of the Department of Biology to provide a wide range of sophisticated, contemporary laboratory experiences to ASC Biology majors in our advanced laboratory courses. As a result, the educational experience of ca. 125 students per year for a projected period of ten years will be impacted directly (with many other students being impacted indirectly), allowing them to compete successfully for positions in graduate and professional schools and for professional biotechnical careers following graduation from Adams State College, as well as enhancing science education in area public schools. Specifically, the Macintosh/MacLabTM-based analog/digital data acquisition system is a state-of-the-art apparatus that permits complex analyses of data collected from an extremely wide range of modern input devices to be easily accomplished. The ease with which complex analyses o f real data acquired by this system may be undertaken will allow an inquiry approach in the teaching laboratory as well as enabling undergraduate student research.
