RESULTS FROM NSF GRANT USE-9150354 - FINAL REPORT QUANTITATIVE CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT FOR THE LIFE SCIENCES Louis J. Gross Professor of Mathematics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Departments of Mathematics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1300 gross@math.utk.edu (423) 974-4295 (423) 974-6576 (FAX) http://www.math.utk.edu/~gross/ SUMMARY The primary objective of this project was to produce a flexible curriculum of quantitative courses for undergraduate life science students, able to be integrated with the biological courses these students take and utilizing examples from recent biological research. This grant funded four workshops on quantitative training of life science undergraduates, through which the goals and content of a quantitative curriculum for life science students were developed. These include guidelines for key concepts and content for both entry-level and upper-division quantitative courses, as well as recommendations for increasing the quantitative component of life science courses themselves. A year-long entry-level quantitative course has been developed based upon the workshop recommendations, and is now a regular course for life science students at UTK. A major effort to collect teaching materials, software, and reviews relevant to the training of life science students has resulted in the Life Science component of the Mathematics Archives WWW/gopher/ftp site (archives.math.utk.edu). Details about the entire project may be found on the project home page at http://www.math.utk.edu/~gross/quant.lifesci.html and as part of the grant we have compiled a WWW page for Mathematical Life Sciences Archives at http://archives.math.utk.edu/mathbio/ Overview: The primary objective of this project was to produce a flexible curriculum of quantitative courses for undergraduate life science students, able to be integrated with the biological courses these students take and utilizing examples from recent biological research. The project had several different components, each of which is discussed briefly below. These are: (1) Organize several workshops which included mathematics and biology educators to discuss quantitative training of undergraduate life science students and make recommendations; (2) Develop a new entry-level math course for life science students based upon the recommendations of the workshops; and (3) Develop a collection of teaching materials, software and reviews relevant to this project. Details for many aspects of the above are posted on the WWW Home Page for this project at http://www.math.utk.edu/~gross/quant.lifesci.html and the WWW Home Page that includes information of software and reviews, as well as links to other sites, is at http://archives.math.utk.edu/mathbio/ Personnel: The P.I. was the only senior staff member supported on this project. The grant supported a total of five months of release time for the P.I. over the course of the project, and the University supported an additional six months of release time for this project. The project supported several graduate students at various levels throughout the project. The major portion of this support, during the first two years of the project, was for Azmy Ackleh, who helped develop the entry-level course and software reviews that were collected. Dr. Ackleh completed a Ph.D. in Mathematical Ecology at UTK, proceeded to a post-doctoral position at North Carolina State University, and is curently a tenure-track faculty member in the Mathematics Department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The grant also partially supported 5 additional graduate students (Elek Dobos, Eric Funasaki, Holly Gaff and Dina Lika in Math, and Craig Zimmermann in Ecology) as well as provided summer support for 3 undergraduate students (Holly Gaff, Shannon Latham, and Shannon Peak). The grant funded participants in four workshops, including a special session at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Biological Sciences and an Open Computer Workshop at this meeting. For the invited Workshops (there were two of these), there were a total of 78 participants from over 40 institutions (mainly U.S. colleges and universities, with a few foreign participants as well). Workshops: This grant funded the organization of two workshops with invited participants as well as a special Symposium and Open Computer Workshop at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Biological Sciences. The first Workshop, held in February 1992, brought together a distinguished group of researchers and educators in mathematical biology to provide guidelines for key concepts and content for entry-level and upper-division quantitative courses for life science students. The second Workshop, held in May 1994, brought together a mixture of biology and mathematics teachers with a focus on developing guidelines and methods to incorporate more quantitative concepts directly within life science courses. Attached to this report are the summary recommendations from these two Workshops, which are also posted on the project Home Page along with more detailed reports. Additionally, I organized both a special Symposium on Quantitative Curricula for the Life Sciences and an Open Computer Laboratory at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The schedule of speakers for the Symposium is attached - there were approximately 50 individuals in attendance for this and approximately 200 individuals attended the Open Computer Laboratory. Course Development: Following the recommendations of the 1992 Workshop, an entry-level mathematics course for life science students was developed that included far more than the traditional short calculus typically provided in such courses. This was designed to be taken by students from a variety of biological and agricultural disciplines. As suggested in the Workshop report, the year-long course (MATH 151-152) was organized with discrete topics in the first semester, followed by the calculus in the second semester. The course makes extensive use of MATLAB for several components, particularly for descriptive statistics, regression, matrix modeling, probability, and difference equations. The course was first offered in a pilot form, taught by the P.I., during the 1992-3 academic year. A second pilot version was taught by the P.I. during the 1993-4 academic year. Since that time, the course has become the standard course in this area, and is taught by a variety of graduate students and faculty. The Instructors Guide for the course is posted on the project Home Page, along with the MATLAB Modules developed for the course and a MATLAB Guide developed for the course. Additionally, an upper division biological modeling course, taken by 12 students, was offered in the Spring of 1992. This made extensive use of various software being evaluated as part of this curriculum development project. As part of this course, the class carried out a project to analyze menstrual cycling and developed a software product to allow a woman to use her own history of menstrual cycles to predict onset of the next cycle. The program was further modified by a student funded by this project (Shannon Peak) during the summer of 1992. The program has been released as Charity-Ware and is available through the Mathematics Archives site at http://www.math.utk.edu/~gross/menstrual.html Dissemination Efforts: The first product from this project was a compilation of software and associated reviews potentially useful in quantitative training of life science students. This compilation included reviews of software carried out by students, a policy adhered to throughout this project - rather than using faculty or teachers as reviewers. Associated with this was a survey of quantitative course requirements for life science students conducted by the P.I. and compiled along with a survey by Aaron Ellison of Mount Holyhoke College. Along with the 1992 Workshop report, hard copy versions of these documents were mailed to over 100 individuals in late 1992 and early 1993. In October 1993 this information, along with a searchable collection of life science software and some software binaries was made available through the Mathematics Archives gopher/ftp site. The P.I. became the moderator for the Life Sciences section of this site (which was separately funded through NSF Grant DUE-9351398). This archive site became the main mode of dissemination of material about this project at that time, with notification of its availability made through postings to a wide variety of newsgroups and list-serves. The site was upgraded to a WWW site in mid-1994 with additional notifications made to various electronic forums at that time. Based upon letters and e-mail received, the Mathematics Archives WWW/ftp/gopher site was an extremely cost-effective method to disseminate information about this project. In the first month of operation there were 1300 uploads of material from the life sciences section of the Math Archives. This may be compared to requests for the software reviews from 21 individuals made by letter or e-mail to the P.I. during December 1992, following an announcement of the project posted to newsgroups. A wide variety of talks and posters about this project have been given by the P.I. at various meetings and institutions. These include: The Southeastern Mathematical Ecology Meeting, Amicolala Falls, Georgia, April 1992 (a discussion session was held as well); the Annual Meeting of American Institute for Biological Sciences, Honolulu, Hawaii, August 1992 (as part of an invited session on Undergraduate Education); the Second Autumn Workshop on Mathematical Ecology, Trieste, Italy, November 1992 (a discussion session was held as well); the Annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Antonio, Texas, January 1993; AMS/MAA Workshop on "Changing Colleagiate Education: Mathematical Sciences and their uses in other Disciplines", Washington D.C., March 1994; MAA Sectional Conference, Johnson City, TN, April 1994; NSF Project Impact Meeting, Washington D.C., June 1994; Annual Meeting of American Institute for Biological Sciences, Knoxville, TN, August 1994; University of Nevada, Reno, September 1994; Iowa State University Workshop on First-Year Mathematics Courses for Students in the Life Sciences, Ames, Iowa, December 1994. This project has had direct and indirect impacts on a number of undergraduate programs at institutions other than the University of Tennessee. In part these have arisen due to the activities of individuals who participated in Workshops sponsored through this project. Institutions thus affected include Denison University, Drexel University, Iowa State University, Marquette University, Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Trinity University, the University of Nevada at Reno (the project P.I. serves on the Advisory Board for the NSF Mathematics across the Curriculum project there), the University of Portland, and the University of Utah. Additionally, the P.I. has corresponded and consulted with individuals at other institutions who are making use of results of this project in their own curriculum development - these include Boston University, CA State University at Monterey Bay, Coe College, Dartmouth University, Emory University, UNC at Greensboro and University of CA at Davis. Articles about this project have appeared in a variety of locations, including professional journals, society newsletters and newspapers. Perhaps the most widely distributed of these was a viewpoint article published in BioScience (Gross, L. J. 1994. Quantitative training for life-science students. BioScience 44:59). Additional articles include: an article by Michael Mesterton-Gibbons which appeared in the Resource Modeling Association Newsletter (Summer 1992), an editorial by Nicholas Stone which appeared in the journal AI Applications (Vol. 6, No 2, 1992), a review in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (Vol 73:265-267) by Carole Hom, and two articles in the Ecological Society of America Education Section Newsletter of April 1994. An article titled "Interdisciplinary Quantitative Curriculum Development: Lessons from a Project in the Life Sciences" describes the project in detail and is available on the project home page.