Professor of Biology Harvey Mudd College Claremont, California, United States
Abstract: The development of an introductory biology curriculum that engages non-majors and effectively teaches biological concepts is a perennial challenge. Many students enter college with the impression that biology courses are based on the memorization of facts about topics of little relevance to their lives and their interests. To connect biology to issues that most students care about and teach non-majors practical and transferable skills, we designed a new introductory biology course to teach biological concepts and data science methods motivated by global climate change.
Our new one-semester introductory biology course for majors and non-majors covers a broad array of biological concepts motivated by the central theme of anthropogenic climate change. The course begins with (1) a short introduction to climate science, and then (2) examines how individual organisms respond to climate change at the physiological and biochemical levels, introducing the underlying molecular biology. It then explores (3) how populations respond to climate change, introducing population dynamics, evolution, and species range distributions. Finally, it shows (4) how ecological communities and ecosystems respond to climate change, focusing on species interactions, community composition and biodiversity. Along the way, we introduce students to the R programming language via a series of in-class activities and homework focused on the analysis, visualization, and interpretation of published biological data. For example, one in-class activity involves analyzing data on elevational range shifts in desert plants and tropical moths, and an accompanying homework assignment explores similar data on tropical birds.
So far we have taught our new course to a cohort of 240 students (all first-year students at our institution, which is a STEM-focused liberal arts college). Initial student surveys revealed that students from all majors found the course engaging and well-integrated, and appreciated the connections to an important societal problem. Ongoing research will allow us to determine how well the course prepares students for further courses in biology, and how it influences student interest in ecology and other areas of biology.
