Presentation:

Although it has been eight years since publication of the Boyer Commission report (1998), challenges remain in reinventing undergraduate education at research universities. Today’s innovative companies want employees who can lead interdisciplinary teams to take creative approaches in solving problems, critically interpret and analyze results, infer general principles, predict future outcomes and challenges, and clearly communicate their findings. These are the skills that define education in a new age of integration. As massive amounts of information are becoming globally and instantaneously accessible, the demand is for graduates who can synthesize and creatively apply these resources to problems at hand. The fact that this skill set coincides exactly with that of a research scientist underscores the unique potential research universities have to educate and produce graduates with these skills. Unfortunately, just when their skills would be most advantageous for today’s students, many of our best researchers are doing less teaching (National Academies, 2004). As a result, creative approaches to training undergraduates in critical thinking are lacking (Black, 2003).

To accomplish a reinvention of undergraduate education we must bring attention to the value of interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching. Recommendations to motivate research professors to engage in redesigning curricula include rewarding innovative teaching through the tenure process and increasing funding for curricular innovation (National Research Council, 2003). While praiseworthy, changes resulting from such initiatives have been hard to implement, largely because teaching is still considered of secondary value to academic success at research universities. Interdisciplinary teaching presents a unique opportunity to directly benefit the research of the faculty member who seeks to redefine education. In a truly interdisciplinary framework, teaching and research are synergistic.

To demonstrate these ideas in practice, we will report on four courses that were developed and implemented in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley (http://ib.berkeley.edu). The designs of the courses follow frameworks for training critical thinking processes put forward by Perry (1970), Nelson (1989), and Lett (1990).

1. Upper-division teaching lab course: Small teams of students rotate through structured, but not “cookbook” multidisciplinary labs that culminate in independent investigations that require students to formulate, research and defend their own discoveries.
2. Upper-division symposium course: After lecturing about core concepts for the first half of the course, the instructor breaks students into teams whose members must present, in scientific symposium style, a primary journal article as if they were contributing authors.
3. Lower-division non-major project course: A diverse group of students is presented with scientific topics that have relevance across many fields focusing on the concept of bio-isnpiration. The students then form cross-disciplinary teams to engage in specific projects in which they use toys to propose and defend designs for the next biologically inspired robot for extra-planetary exploration.
4. Introductory biology field lab: In a large general biology class, students can choose to do alternative field research-based labs rather than the general course lab. Graduate students lead these labs in which 20- to-30 students, working at one of several off-campus field sites, design and conduct experiments on guided research questions.

Our experience with these courses has made it clear that research-based teaching inspires teaching-based research. Students become more capable researchers through the integration of research-related exercise and pedagogy that emulates research methods and practices. The graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who participate in the teaching generate new research ideas and are better able to communicate with interdisciplinary collaborators. Undergraduates who have taken these courses and gone on to further study have facilitated the transfer of concepts and resources to develop new fields, form industrial partnerships, and engage in interdisciplinary research teams. In an effort to promote this reciprocal relationship, a new Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CIBER) is being inaugurated at the University of California at Berkeley.

Discussion:

Despite the optimism that these specific examples of integrating teaching and research inspire, those interested in promoting and conducting interdisciplinary teaching and research face daunting challenges. Breakout group members first discussed concerns about the design and implementation of interdisciplinary courses and then formed three sub-groups to address one of three core challenges: promoting interdisciplinary study, rewarding change, and assessment.

As the multidisciplinary framework underlying the group’s discussion suggests, the ideas promulgated at the session should not be limited to biology or even science alone. These ideas can, and indeed must, be applied generally to high enrollment classes which are endemic at research universities.

The symposium- and project-based classes were successful in settings with 60-100 students. Teaming graduate student instructors with small groups of undergraduates can facilitate inquiry-based learning in even the largest classes.

Teaching content is always an issue. We must provide our students with the core concepts of the field, but information is increasing so rapidly that we often must give up or off-load specific detailed content to provide opportunities for inquiry- and research-based learning.

For faculty members, the development of innovative curricula takes a great deal of time. To prevent research from suffering, one can develop courses incrementally over several years and specifically limit the time one is available during the semester.

A frequent impediment to implementing research-based courses is the lack of equipment and space. One way to address this problem is to designate a common teaching-research lab space independent of individual professors’ laboratories. This approach has worked successfully with CIBER.

Recommendations:

The three sub-groups proposed the following recommendations:

• Promoting Interdisciplinary Study: To facilitate new course designs, every department or program should be required to establish at least one interdisciplinary inquiry- or research-based course that is required of all students in that major. Developing new courses will be challenging, particularly for new faculty members. We need to make use of pre-existing systems and resources, like graduate students, to facilitate taking on students as agents of learning and research.

• Rewarding Change: To promote institutional incentives for novel research-based teaching, tenure and promotion guidelines should define research broadly to encompass interdisciplinary teaching endeavors. Institutions should recognize that faculty members who successfully implement research-based teaching, particularly across fields, are often contributing to their research success.

• Assessment: To determine the impact of inquiry- and research-based, we recommend the development of a set of best practices for assessing undergraduate research-based approaches including strategies and tools (e.g. students portfolios) that can be used in diverse learning environments. While challenging to formulate, we must develop both short- and long-term identifiable student outcomes for these specific course designs.

References/Resources:

Publications

1. Black, H. (2003). "Needs improvement." The Scientist, August 19 4(1): 20030819-01. Website: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20030819/01/
2. Boyer Commission, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Universities (1998). http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/
3. Lett, J. (1990). “A Field guide to Critical Thinking.” Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, 14(2):
   153-160
4. National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology: First Meeting Report. August 16-20, 2004. Website: http://dels.nas.edu/summerinst/index.shtml
5. National Research Council. (2003). Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Committee on Recognizing, Evaluating, Rewarding, and Developing Excellence in Teaching of Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology, M.A. Fox and N. Hackerman, Editors. Center for Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Website: http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10024.html
6. Nelson, C.E. (1989). “Skewered on the unicorn's horn: The illusion of tragic tradeoff between content and critical thinking in the teaching of science.” In Enhancing Critical Thinking in the Sciences (Ed. L.W. Crow) pp 17-27. Soc. College Science Teachers, National Science Teachers Assoc. Washington, DC.
7. Perry, W. G., Jr. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. Holt, Rinehardt & Winston. Republished (19990 by Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Websites

1. Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-Inspiration in Education and Research (CIBER): http://ciber.berkeley.edu
2. Department of Integrative Biology, the University of California at Berkeley: http://ib.berkeley.edu
3. Robert J. Full: polypedal.berkeley.edu