The goals of this project are (1) to make possible the implementation of a new student-designed human physiology laboratory model which integrates scientific inquiry ilto several courses requiring a physiology laboratory and (2) to formally assess curricular goals that utilize student-designed laboratories as pedagogy. This laboratory model enables students to design their own laboratory exercises, collect data, and analyze their data with the use of microcomputer technology. The project addresses a number of recommendations from national educational associations as its goals. A pilot study was conducted with the limited equipment available at the university. While the students learned a great deal about methodology, controls, and financial constraints as they attempted to create experiments on their own, they were limited by the lack of variable gathering instrumentation and more sophisticated data analysis capabilities. The new equipment for this project includes six microcomputers with software and transducers to assess cardiac function, brain function by wave analysis, muscle function, exercise/fitness-related data, respiratory function, skin temperature, and galvonic skin response. In addition, new microcomputer-assisted software enables students to take a more active role in experimental design. Taking a more active role in designing laboratories enables the student to become more acquainted with the scientific process as it actually is, i.e., creating the ideas behind the experiments and not simply performing a cookbook-type laboratory exercise.
