Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his article on the new National Research Council (NRC) report on needed reforms in undergraduate biology education, Erik Stokstad (“Biology departments urged to bone up,” News of the Week, 13 Sept., p. [1789][1]) mentions some of the obstacles to effective curriculum reform—the immense inertia of the faculty and their reluctance to give up “their” subject. One of the primary drivers of these impediments was identified in the Editorial by Timothy Goldsmith in the same issue (“Why is a liberal education so elusive?”, 13 Sept., p. [1769][2]): Faculty are usually reluctant to teach outside their areas of expertise. From the perspective of curriculum reform, this combination can be deadly. It also leads to a curriculum whose composition is stochastic rather than planned, as courses are added or dropped as faculty arrive and leave. But at least for the first 2 or 3 years of undergraduate education, most biology faculty ought to be able to teach effectively in several broad areas—why do we insist that an upper-year high school teacher cover all areas but that only 1 or 2 years later, students must be taught in a specialist fashion? The solution is obvious but very challenging: design a curriculum around goals rather than content and involve the faculty in teaching fundamental, cross-disciplinary courses and courses outside their area of expertise. This could be enormously stimulating! For many years in a biology department, I taught biostatistics, a course whose content cut aggressively across all discipline areas. The freedom from parochial, specialty-driven course content and the sheer joy of teaching something that was fundamentally and enduringly important enlivened and invigorated my teaching. A curriculum designed on goals and cross-disciplinary content could be a lot slimmer than the obese, fact-filled, overlapping and often repetitive courses that constitute the typical biology curriculum. Such a lean curriculum would free up the time needed to involve undergraduates in real, meaningful research activity—a real benefit to both students and faculty. # {#article-title-2} It is encouraging to learn that biology faculty recognize that “undergraduates [need] a better appreciation of the connections between biology and the physical sciences” (“Biology departments urged to bone up,” E. Stokstad, News of the Week, 13 Sept., p. [1789][1]) and that steps are being taken to improve the situation. Let me suggest a method established 30 years ago at the University of California, Irvine, that required two luncheon meetings to implement: one with David Brandt (chemistry) and myself (biology) and the other between William Parker (physics) and myself. I asked these researchers and teachers to tell me what they teach in their beginning chemistry and physics courses: the gas laws, pH, oxidation and reduction, and kinetics and thermodynamics. I then made it a point in my beginning cell biology course to correlate those subjects with my lectures on osmotic pressure; colligative properties and determining the molecular weight of proteins; the Henderson-Hasselbach principles of buffers; electron transfer reactions in the mitochondria; Michaelis-Menton enzyme kinetics; and the production and utilization of energy in metabolism. As a result, the students grasped these concepts of cell biology more easily because they had already learned the basic chemistry and physics involved. They also recognized that chemistry and physics were necessary for a deeper understanding of biology and that those courses were not just requirements to take and then forget. And the lunches were good, too. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.297.5588.1789a [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.297.5588.1769
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".