A fully integrated undergraduate introductory biology and chemistry course with a community‐based focus I: Vision, design, implementation, and development

Abstract

We describe a first-semester, integrated, introductory biology and chemistry course for undergraduates at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, USA. Our vision was to create a supportive learning community in which students could comfortably make connections between scientific disciplines as they learned necessary content for subsequent courses, further developed problem solving, communication, and laboratory skills, and meaningfully connected with other students and with faculty during their first semester in college. Through highlighting five guiding principles that are central to the course, we describe the integrated course structure and content as well as our efforts to build community, provide support, and engage students in building skills crucial to scientists. We also highlight features of this course and institutional policies that facilitated its logistical and collaborative implementation that can be adapted to fit the needs, goals, and constraints of a diverse range of institutions. A companion article describes an assessment of our course in achieving academic and community building goals.

“I am here because I wanted to shine”: how poetry can be used to better understand undergraduate students’ first-year chemistry or related course experiences

“…The second category to emerge from our analysis was 'Community,' a result that is expected as a successful outcome of this unique course for which an explicit underlying principle was Community Building (Beers et al, 2021). Community and teamwork building were accomplished through both in-class/ in-lab exercises as well as through multiple, voluntary out-ofclass informal social experiences.…”

“…This initial study was carried out within the curriculum of an integrated, introductory chemistry and biology course class that has been previously described (Beers et al, 2021) and assessed (Pociask et al, 2021) using more traditional methods such as transcript analysis and focus groups. This is a teamtaught course intended for first-semester undergraduates that meets for more weekly contact hours than a corresponding 'standard' chemistry-only or biology-only introductory course (but for less time than the standard courses combined) and that places great emphasis on community-building, content integration, and skill-building.…”