Deadline for Applications: April 21, 2006
Decision on successful applicants: April 26, 2006

It is the mission of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater (UWW) to provide high quality educational and research experiences to undergraduate students, resulting in functioning scientists, health care providers, educators, and citizens.

A recent movement in the pedagogy of science education has driven experiential learning to the forefront. As a resonant example, our department has taken extraordinary steps over the past five years to revise our curriculum to initiate exploratory learning through several mechanisms. First, four members of our faculty have recently received NSF funding to develop a comprehensive research-based introductory biology course sequence for majors. Second, our curriculum offers a variety of capstone experiences through our undergraduate research, independent study, internship, and honors thesis. Third, many of our advanced courses such as Animal Physiology, Endocrinology, Microbiology, Organic Evolution, Molecular Biology, Developmental Biology, and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy now include independent and group research projects as part of the curriculum.

Self-assessment of our existing programs has identified goals for improvement based upon the following observations. High school science teachers traditionally were trained in presentation of dated accepted facts, termed "scientific knowledge", and acquire a knowledge base as part of their training, but have limited exposure to hands-on experimental biology. Biology education majors rarely participate in undergraduate research or other capstone experiences. The exhaustive curricular demands for education majors, requiring 140+ credits (in contrast to ~120 credits), make it difficult for science education majors to participate in undergraduate research. Further, several groups of students are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences (first generation college students, ethnic minorities) as well as students who have additional obstacles to participation in undergraduate research (students with disabilities). These observations drive the goals of our proposal, Biology Educator and Student Training-Team Experience in Research Program (BEST-TERP or TERP for short).