The Biology Department of Elon College plans a significant improvement of our program to fundamentally alter the experiences of 250 students enrolled annually in the human and animal physiology and anatomy laboratories addressed in this proposal. We want to enhance testing of hypotheses and data collection and analysis. This pedagogical approach can be the most dramatic and productive through the application of computer technologies. Through a cogent program the Department wants to introduce computer applications early in the courses. As sophomores, biology majors in zoology will be concerned with the fundamentals of muscle contraction, nerve conductance and cardiac function. In upper-level courses these phenomena and others will be investigated in more highly integrated and independent laboratory activities. Students in sports medicine will be provided a more realistic study of human anatomy and physiology in preparation for courses in exercise physiology and kinesiology. Elon College will purchase 13 Power Macintosh 7200 computers and one Power Macintosh 7600 computer to equip two separate computer laboratories to support the instruction of human and vertebrate anatomy and physiology. The anatomy group will consist of six student workstations while the physiology group will consist of one instructor's station/server and seven student workstations, with each workstation serving three students. These stations, with appropriate software and CD-ROM capabilities, will have far reaching pedagogic consequences because of their tremendous flexibility and capacity to measure, record and immediately analyze physiological and morphological phenomena.
