Addressing the mismatch between students' epistemological beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning in biology and physics (e.g., biology is about memorizing facts, and physics is about memorizing equations and plugging in numbers) and actual scientific practice is not commonly an explicit learning outcome of introductory science courses.
This study examines the effect of blended coursework on student learning outcomes in introductory economics courses.
While these goals are all consonant with a strong foundation in scientific literacy, prior to the creation of Biological Inquiry, few (if any) of these competencies were targeted learning outcomes of introductory biology courses, whether for majors or nonmajors.
Concept inventories have also been used to quantify the outcomes of introductory and upper-division physics courses (Kohlmyer et al., 2009; Caballero et al., 2012; Chasteen et al., 2012).
In the process of initial course design, we defined a set of learning outcomes for introductory molecular and cell biology that encompassed both "traditional" concepts covered in such courses and the ability to apply a particular set of quantitative skills to biological problems.
In this paper, we present outcomes from redesigning an introductory physics course sequence at Michigan State University (MSU) to directly address the needs of life sciences students.
The introductory article to the Bioresource Technology issue, as well as the review paper cited above, describe the outcomes of an effective pretreatment process [ 6].
This so-called active learning has become a popular strategy for reforming all manner of introductory courses, from asking students to predict the outcome of a hypothetical situation to sharing information in labs and group discussions.
This outcome is evidence for the extreme difficulties introductory biology students have interpreting phylogenetic trees and for students memorizing reasoning without understanding its application.
We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life sciences majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue postbaccalaureate studies in medical and scientific fields.
