During the second year of Colby’s National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, the Award for Integration of Research and Education (AIRE), the College has continued to bring significant attention to integrating research into education, on campus and beyond. The hiring of four NSF-AIRE Fellows has allowed significant progress to be made. The NSF-AIRE Site Visit Team has expanded our thinking and suggested new approaches for completion of the project.

NSF-AIRE Fellows. Last year, we described the hiring of the NSF-AIRE Fellows Larkspur Morton (biology), Philip Nyhus (environmental studies), Andrew Kortyna (physics), and Stephen Theberge (chemistry). Each NSF-AIRE Fellow made significant contributions to the AIRE Program at Colby. Dr. Morton, NSF-AIRE Fellow in Biology (1999-2001) was instrumental in organizing the course, Biodiversity, with an inquiry-based laboratory. Dr. Morton is team teaching Biodiversity with Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Biology Catherine R. Bevier this fall of 2000. There are 39 students currently in this course. As a consequence, the Introductory Biology course now has notably reduced numbers enrolled. It has dropped to 111 students for the fall semester of this year from 140 last year. Laboratory sections have also been reduced by a few students in each section. In addition, she developed an upper-level research course Behavioral Ecology, in which students will conduct semester-long studies and other shorter studies. Dr. Morton oversaw a student’s independent study project through the Department of Sociology on the use and effectiveness of inquiry- and research-based approaches in biology laboratories here at Colby. She also advised four independent study students on their research projects. During the spring of 2000, she worked with students in Ornithology on their independent laboratory research projects. She planned, organized, and led the 2000 NSF-AIRE Teaching and Learning Workshop entitled Engaging Students in Lecture Courses - Sharing Approaches Across the Disciplines. She will also conduct a workshop for the Fall 2000 on inquiry-based laboratories - where independent guided research is the focus.

Andrew Kortyna, NSF-AIRE Fellow in Physics (1999-2001), developed the course Experimental Atomic Physics, a laboratory-based course that uses research quality lasers to do high resolution atomic spectroscopy. Dr. Kortyna also introduced a peer review system into this course where the students review each other's laboratory reports -- an approach that is modeled on the referee process used in peer review journals. Mr. Kortyna is currently also modifying the Colby atom trap so that is can be used by both students and faculty to study low energy atom collisions.

Philip J. Nyhus, NSF-AIRE Fellow in Environmental Studies (1999-2001), co-instructed Problems in Environmental Science with Clara C. Piper Professor of Environmental Studies David H. Firmage. Dr. Nyhus worked with students on field- and laboratory-based exercises. He began developing a new course for January 2001 entitled, Introduction to GIS and Remote Sensing. Students will develop and carry out independent research projects using geographic information systems at Colby. He is also developing a new course, Global Change--Life Science and Society. This course will be part of a coordinated Integrated Studies Program cluster with another course, Global Change--Environmental Science and Society taught by Associate Professor of Physics James R. Fleming. Students will be expected to carry out independent research on this topic. Dr. Nyhus has also been co-organizer (with Prof. Firmage) of the very successful Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium that was held April 26-28, 2000. Dr. Nyhus served as principal advisor for a senior’s research and was co-advisor on research of two other seniors. Throughout last year, Dr. Nyhus submitted several proposals for funding of research for himself and students as well as for upgrades to GIS at Colby College. Dr. Nyhus secured a grant for Colby from ERSI giving us the software for ArcInfo and ArcView. He has recently received a grant from ERSI for ArcIMS, a program allowing the GIS maps to be put on the Web. Maps put up using this program are dynamic and interactive, allowing viewers to obtain various types of information by having the display done in different forms. Dr. Nyhus has also received two grants from The Tiger Foundation to continue his work on the endangered Sumatran Tiger and one grant from the NSF on biocomplexity-incubation activity models and meta-networks for interdisciplinary research in biodiversity risk assessment.

Stephen Theberge, NSF-AIRE Fellow in Chemistry (1999-2000), organized and implemented eight new laboratory experiments for a non-majors course, The Chemistry of Life during JanPlan. Many of the experiments were inquiry-based and used research quality instruments including FT4R, Raman, GC-MS, and UV spectroscopy. He prepared the laboratory manual for CH 118 as web-based. A central story/theme ran through the experiments and students became forensic chemists for the month trying to find out "whodunnit." Dr. Theberge also assisted Shari Dunham, Dr. Gerald and Myra Dorros Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, in the laboratory section of Instrumental Analysis where students perform "real-life" analyses using state-of-the-art instrumentation. Dr. Theberge worked with a senior on a research project that developed a novel system for measuring hydrogen peroxide concentrations with a flow-injection method. This student’s results were presented at a national meeting (ACS San Francisco). The research will most likely result in a publication. Dr. Theberge left Colby at the end of his NSF-AIRE Fellowship during the summer 2000 to accept a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Merrimac College in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Geological Capability Enhanced. Last year, the Department of Geology purchased with NSF-AIRE funds an Olympus Stereozoom dissecting microscope, with trinocular head, CCTV capabilities, and a high-resolution monitor. This microscope and the accompanying video system have already seen service in the Mineralogy, Optical Mineralogy, and courses, in which we have been able to demonstrate to students the fine structural detail on very small specimens, specimens which otherwise would be left to individual hit-or-miss discovery. We can now actually demonstrate clearly and unequivocally to students precisely what we are explaining with regards to this fine microstructure, and in the minerals in particular, to show that tiny crystals of a given mineral exhibit precisely the same form and properties of larger, more readily studied specimens. The equipment is currently seeing use in the Department, and it is planned to use it as well the next time that the introductory Paleontology for Non-Majors course is taught.

Distributional Course Developments. Our distributional courses have been improved and are incorporating aspects of research and inquiry-based learning. Using NSF AIRE funds, we were able to design and offer a new course this year, Explorations with Robots. This course is aimed at the non-science majors, providing a gentle introduction to programming in C and to problem-solving skills. Students learned to build simple robots and program solutions to problems such as keeping a robot inside an area marked on the floor, following a line, and navigating around an obstacle. Students designed their own final projects, and were very enthusiastic and creative about doing so. Final projects included robots that played tag with each other, robots that collected ping-pong balls and returned them to home base, and robots that searched for objects in a grid world, and communicated the location of these to a second robot, which then navigated directly to the objects. The materials used by this course have also been used by several other students. Several students in CS113, Great Ideas in Computer Science, chose to work with robots for their final projects. A senior, computer science major used the equipment to pursue a Senior Scholars project on "Machine Learning and Robot Navigation," earning college honors for his project and presenting his work at a conference. In the 2000-01 academic year, two seniors have expressed an interest in doing independent study projects with the robots.

Another distributional course, Chemistry of Life (including a forensics project for the laboratory portion), was taught in January 2000 as a Jan Plan by Associate Professor of Chemistry Julie T. Millard. The experiments revolve around the central theme of forensics. At the first meeting, a hit-and-run type car accident has just occurred and the students are required to analyze plastic samples collected from the scene. As the "Colby Crime Lab" continued through the session, the lab manual and other "story" information were kept up to date on the web with pictures that had been taken at other alleged crime scenes. Some of the experiments were inquiry-based (Analysis of a White Powder), while others relied more on instrumentation (GC-MS and Raman). At the last session, one of the chemistry seniors was "arrested" and led out of the lab. The distributional course, The Elements, was taught in Physics in the fall of 2000. Biodiversity was developed during the 1999-2000 academic year and is being taught this fall. Microorganisms and Society was enhanced with three-week research projects and is taught in the spring.

Gateway Courses. Efforts to reduce the size of gateway courses and to increase their research component have continued. Introductory Physics has been redesigned for the second semester portion of the course. It now has been modified to include two sections, not one, thus reducing overall class size. General Chemistry has been divided into two sections for the second semester, further reducing the class size. Biodiveristy has reduced the size of Introductory Biology by 29 students. The efforts to upgrade student skills in descriptive statistics, data analysis, probability and sampling distributions, and hypothesis testing will be conducted in the third year of the grant.

Cross-Curriculum Stipends. During the summer of 1999, five faculty across the curriculum were selected after a competitive proposal process to receive stipends to develop or upgrade courses by integrating an enhanced research component into them. Emphasis was placed on distributional courses that all students take in completing their degree requirements and on courses that strengthen education through research in specific majors. Reports for each of the projects can be found at http://www.colby.edu/NSF_AIRE/ResThEd.html.

The five projects funded were as follows:

Environment and Society was taught during the Spring 2000 with 48 students participating. The new research component entailed having the students conduct a research project. The students and faculty met one night per week where the students were taught research methods. After class, the students brain-stormed about topics and the faculty reviewed the proposed topics to a workable list. The students chose among the topics and worked alone or in small groups to conduct their research projects. The effort culminated in the students completing reports and making oral presentations. The faculty very much appreciated having NSF-AIRE support and will be continuing this approach the next time that they teach this course.

In the Spring 2000, Karen Kusiak revised Teaching Students with Special Needs with support from NSF-AIRE and included a strand on investigating the use of Assistive Technology (AT). Students researched appropriate technological solutions for given case studies. New content and learning activities included: readings about AT, viewing short video tapes of students using AT, Prof. Kusiak demonstrating a few devices that she borrowed from the University of Maine at Farmington (UMF), three AT student assistants from the AT resource center at UMF visiting her class to demonstrate and explain a variety of devices, and the presentation of student research for the case studies. Student research included finding reviews of equipment and software on the World-wide Web visiting a local vendor of AT and trying "speak-to-write" programs, contacting an AT consultant for advice about appropriate software for a given case, and trying out various devices in class during the presentation from UMF students. Students worked alone or in small groups to complete the research and make the presentation in class. Each of the 14 students or team wrote a two- to four-page recommendation for AT that would be appropriate for their case study student. Professor Kusiak will be retaining these upgrades in her class because the students were involved in solving an authentic problem. As a teacher educator, Prof. Kusiak tries to instill in pre-service teachers intellectual habits that they will use in their teaching. One habit that this research opportunity provided was for pre-service teachers to consider closely the needs of a particular case study student and determine what kind of AT would be most appropriate given the student's abilities, environment, and needs. Prof. Kusiak hopes that they would make equally careful decisions about students and resources when they are teachers. Practicing teachers need to collaborate with specialists when they prepare educational programs for students who have disabilities. In a way, our opportunity to collaborate with the AT specialists from UMF modeled the way that regular education teachers need to consult with special education teachers and therapists in their work.

The distribution course, Microorganisms and Society, was taught in the Spring 2000 by Professor Frank A. Fekete as a lecture and with two sections of laboratory. Course development supported by NSF-AIRE was for the laboratory component of the course exclusively. There were 24 students in each of two sections of laboratory. Prof. Fekete enhanced this course to allow students much more choice of their own research projects so that the students would have more ownership and greater vested interests in the research projects, He did away with having a single research topic to which everyone would contribute. It was his desire to put together a laboratory experience that "exposed the students to the whole scientific approach in asking and answering questions." He started from simple exercises, talked about forming hypotheses, setting up experiments and using the results to support conclusions. The last part of the course enabled the students to practice many of the different ways in which scientists communicate their ideas and findings. They wrote papers, constructed poster presentations, and presented their research before an audience of their peers. NSF-AIRE funding was used to establish the logistics regarding the necessary microbiological training and techniques.

Overall, the incorporation of independent research projects in Microorganisms and Society was successful. The incorporation of this inquiry-based approach in a non-science majors laboratory experience proved to be an effective way to engage the students in learning microbiological concepts, and also to experience the process of how science is done and how results are presented. By making the student responsible for the conception and success of their research project gives the student an added level of ownership for the entire experience and seems to have a positive impact on the quality of their work. The point-of-view that a non-science major brings to the laboratory is refreshing and sometimes very insightful. Based on these successes and what he learned during the spring 2000 semester, Prof. Fekete intends to continue to develop the inquiry-based approach in the Microorganisms and Society laboratory.

Steering Committee. The Steering Committee has taken advantage of the Internet such that our meetings are most frequent on the Web and less so in person. Because Professor F. Russell Cole was away for a year on sabbatical, Professor David H. Firmage led the program for the 1999-2000 academic year. Meetings were held during the year to assess the progress on the various portions of the grant proposal.

NSF-AIRE Site Visit. This year was marked by the unexpected, but welcomed site visit of representatives for NSF. The team included James Lightbourne of NSF, Professor of Biology Donald Cronkite from Hope College, Professor of Biology Bruce Voyles from Grinnell College, Professor of Chemistry Theresa J. Zielinski from Monmouth University, Professor of Physics James E. Payne from South Carolina State University, and Professor of Science and Technology William White from Jackson State University. Professor of Chemistry Bilin P. Tsai from the University of Minnesota-Duluth was unable to attend at the last moment. We have received the site-visit report from NSF and will be responding to it shortly.

Alumni Survey. Over the past year, we surveyed approximately 2,800 alumni from the Division of Natural Sciences who had graduated since 1955, i.e., those years when they might still be working. We have received responses from about 650 alumni. The results are being entered into a FileMakerPro database. In 1998, we surveyed alumni of the Division of Natural Sciences who had graduated since 1993. To date, 457 responses are available for analysis from the 1998 and 2000 surveys (180 for 1998 and 277 for 2000). The remaining data are still being keyboarded.

Alumni were asked if they had conducted independent research or an internship while they were at Colby College and, if they had conducted such work, was it as an independent project, as a faculty research assistant, with an internship, as senior honors, or as senior scholars. It is clear that the change in pedagogy at Colby over the past 50 years has dramatically increased the experiences that students had as research scientists (Table 1). In the 1990s, only 14% of all the respondents had no research experience while in the 1980s the number was over twice that at 32%. We believe that this change is noteworthy and look forward to future results when the database is complete.

Table 1: Trend in preliminary data from alumni survey as percents of total

When alumni were asked if they obtained their first job through an organized search or by just happening onto it, preliminary responses indicated that alumni in the 1990s conducted more organized job searches than did those alumni from in earlier decades (Table 2).

Table 2: Trend in preliminary data on first employment

The remaining questions about graduate school, postbaccalaureate awards, and curriculum will be presented in our next annual report when the entire data set is completely entered.

Grinnell College Site Visit. Acting Project Director David H. Firmage traveled to Grinnell College in July 2000 to participate in a review of their NSF-AIRE grant This enabled him to see other ways of incorporating research into the curriculum beyond what has been done at Colby. Some of the ideas coming from this visit are being put forward as proposals to the Department of Biology at Colby.

Student Research Symposium. The first college-wide research symposium was held on April 26-28, 2000. Seventy-nine students presented their work in both oral and poster sessions. Students from all of the science departments participated as did students from the Departments of Psychology, Art, Education, Religious Studies, Latin American Studies, History, and Environmental Studies. The program and abstracts can be found on our NSF-AIRE web pages (http://www.colby.edu/NSF_AIRE/SympProg00.html). The keynote speaker, Dr. Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist/biologist at Harvard University, spoke on "The Science of Human Nature, and the Human Nature of Science: Lessons from the Other Apes." Approximately 140 people attended this dynamic, thought-provoking lecture.

On-campus Workshops. On April 14, 2000, NSF-AIRE Fellow Larkspur Morton led a workshop on teaching techniques, entitled Engaging Students in Lecture Courses; Sharing Approaches Across the Disciplines. This workshop included sections on a) engaging students in active learning, b) encouraging student preparation for lecture, and c) teaching process vs. content: a balancing act. Two more on-campus workshops will be held next year on these pedagogy and research.

Papers and Presentations. On November 4-5, 1999, NSF-AIRE Fellows Philip Nyhus and Larkspur Morton attended the1999 Sigma Xi Forum in Minneapolis, MN. The forum was entitled, Reshaping Undergraduate Science and Engineering Education: Tools for Better Learning. NSF-AIRE Fellow Philip Nyhus presented a pedagogical poster at the meeting entitled, "Immersing Ourselves: Integrating GIS and Inquiry-Based Learning for Regional Water Quality Assessment at Colby College." This poster, co-authored by Professors Cole and Firmage, covered techniques for integrating GIS research into the water quality assessment effort of the senior-level environmental science class in biology.

Dr. Larkspur Morton and Assistant Professor Catherine R. Bevier traveled to the 8^th National Conference of the Council on Undergraduate Research, held at the College of Wooster in Ohio on June 22-24, 2000. The meeting was entitled, "The Many Facets of Undergraduate Research." Drs. Morton and Bevier attended sessions on innovative ways to teach introductory biology and on ways to improve introductory laboratories. They are currently incorporating several approaches that they learned at the conference into our team-taught, distributional course, Biodiversity, which was developed with NSF-AIRE support. Dr. Morton also attended sessions on integrating research and education, specifically addressing how to provide research experiences to most or all students in a major.

Professor David H. Firmage and NSF-AIRE Fellow Philip J. Nyhus presented a paper at the Maine Water Conference 2000, on April 13, 2000 in Augusta, Maine. Their talk was entitled, "Water Quality at the Headwaters of the Belgrade Lakes: An Interdisciplinary Assessment of East Pond and Surrounding Watersheds." The paper summarized the research results from the 1999 Problems in Environmental Science course.

Professor Firmage also attended the Northeast Environmental Studies meeting at Bucknell University in October 1999 where he presented the enhancements of the Introductory Environmental Studies course by adding a strong research component. This enhancement was funded by a stipend from the NSF-AIRE grant.

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Biology Judy Stone attended a symposium on strategies for teaching evolution on Friday, June 23, 2000, organized by the Education Committee of the Society for the Study of Evolution. On June 25, she attended a laboratory demonstration session entitled, "Applied and Investigative Laboratory Exercises in Evolution," led by Janis Antonovics of the University of Virginia. Both events were associated with the annual SSE meeting, which this year was in Bloomington, IN.

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Geology Jennifer Shosa also recently published a paper in the Journal of Geoscience Education (vol. 4, no. 4, due out in September 2000) entitled, "Self-contained Problem Sets as a Means of Incorporating Quantitative Skill Development in Existing Introductory Geoscience Courses." Dr. Shosa presented this as

material under the same title at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of American in October 1999.

Professor and Chair of Biology W. Herbert Wilson, Jr. attended the Undergraduate and Precollege Program Director's meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD on Oct. 10-12, 2000. The group focused on current trends in undergraduate and K-12 education. Two areas of particular interest were considerations of program assessment and enhancing diversity in the sciences.

NSF-AIRE Fellow Steven Theberge presented his work on developing the non-majors forensic-based chemistry laboratory course during the August 2000 national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, DC this past August. The course, Chemistry of Life, was taught in January 2000.

Assistant Professor of computer Science Clare B. Congdon presented a paper entitled, "Machine Learning in the Liberal Arts Curriculum," at the Proceedings of the 31st SIGCSE Technical Symposium in Computer Science Education, Austin, TX in March, 2000. Professor Congdon also led a discussion session, "Birds of a Feather." She also presented the results of a Colby-Bowdoin-Bates Mellon grant with two professors at Bowdoin College on her work on the World-wide Web site to facilitate the sharing of information about using small robots in the CS curriculum at small colleges. On April 28-29, 2000, she attended a regional computer science education conference (CCSCNE), escorting three students who presented posters and again attracting positive attention to the growing Colby Computer Science Department. One student won a prize for his work. Professor Congdon also attended the elite Liberal Arts Consortium for computer science at small colleges, held at Bowdoin College, June 22-24, 2000, to discuss pedagogical issues within our academic environments and discipline.

Outreach: Colby Partnership for Science Education. Our faculty continually work with the four school districts surrounding Colby. We have made significant progress in empowering teachers to design lesson plans that encompass research as a pedagogical tool. For instance, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Clare B. Congdon and senior in computer science are working with the Waterville Gifted and Talented Program on the design and implementation of robotic agents. Over the course of this year, they will run an after-school program for local high school students in which they will learn the basics of building and programming small robots. The robots are built with plywood and hobby shop motors and sensors and motors are connected to a small on-board computer. After initial exercises to learn to work with the equipment and the basics of programming, students will design, build, and program their own robots. Some possible tasks include robots that can follow a line on the floor, play tag with each other, run a slalom of lights, and gather ping pong balls. In the course of the year, students will gain extensive experience and discipline in problem solving as they work through the exercises and their own designs.

Website: The Colby NSF AIRE web page (http://www.colby.edu/NSF_AIRE/) has been redesigned to be more user friendly, as was suggested by those doing our site visit. Navigation is now much easier and the areas of focus are far more clearly delineated. We have added material from the student research presentations as well as activities in each of the areas covered by the grant.