| Popis: |
N \| ot all students perceive the advantages inherent within the traditional introductory biology laboratory experience. As biologists, we feel that the importance and relevance of biology should be obvious and self-evident. After all, why else would we have devoted our careers to this field? It worked for us; it should work for our students! However, students in introductory courses may not be focused on which discipline they will eventually settle into as their major. Even if they know at that early stage that they want to be biology majors, they have little exposure to the many subdisciplines within the major and don't always know which area will eventually be of most interest to them. Students may be repulsed by the smell and the nature of laboratory dissections and consequently get less intellectual stimulation from the exercise than we would hope. Students do not often come to us already knowing how to make careful, detailed dissections and are often confused by the mass of "guts" without knowing what they should be seeing. By the time the instructors work their way to the back of the lab, they usually find little but unattached "parts" with students who don't understand what they detached nor the relevance of the detached items. |
