Frontiers of Science Set For Curriculum Changes

The Frontiers of Science program, now completing its third year of a five-year experiment, is due to undergo structural changes that will increase continuity between the lectures and seminars, as both students and faculty pinpoint areas in which they believe improvement should be made.

Darcy Kelley, biology professor and co-chair of the Frontiers program, said that for next year, the designers of the program plan to "adopt a method for engaging students with material to replace the WIAs [Weekly Individual Assignments]," which includes using a new method for assigning and reading scientific papers.

"Either they [the WIAs] are too easy, or they're too difficult. It's difficult to draw connections between the lectures and discussions," Kelley said.

One of the key issues raised by students was the weekly assignments. Many students said that the assessments did not test their grasp of the scientific material.

"The WIAs are busy work, but they're not conceptual," Nathan Morgante, CC '09, said. "I don't think giving us statistical busy work is the way to make us think more scientifically."

During the class's elective pilot program four years ago, César Cabrera, CC '07, attended a few lectures without taking the course. "I heard it was ineffective because they force science on you," Cabrera said. "They teach certain parts of things for you to do the problem sets."

Timon McPhearson, a postdoctoral environmental biology research scientist and a Frontiers of Science section leader, said, "It'd be nice to have an exercise that is the same-a way of teaching that is the same across all sections for each unit." He noted that he thought such a device would allow students to read scientific papers and help "decrease variation" among the sections.

There is a disparity between some of the issues being targeted for change by the administration and those students raised, many of which were enumerated in a proposal passed Sunday by the Columbia College Student Council to effect change in the program.

Frontiers of Science "looked really good on paper," Kevin McKenna, CC '10, said. "But then I took it."

"I really love that we had a broad, introductory science course," said Maxine Paul, CC '10, who took the course last semester. "The main problem was the application of what we learned."

Cashel Rosier, CC '10, echoed that sentiment in regard to the tests. "It was kind of stressful because the topics were interesting, but when you get to the test, it wasn't on anything we'd learned," he said.

Administrators said that although the curriculum needs to be revised, it is still effective. "In my opinion, I don't think students go through and forget about it-I think that's what they think happens," McPhearson said. "Students learn a lot more than they think they do."

Though Frontiers is still receiving mixed reviews from some students, its designers and teachers are adamant about the importance of retaining it as part of the Core Curriculum. Professor David Helfand, the original creator of the course, said that administrators are committed to achieving the two main goals of the course: to teach students to think more scientifically and to "disabuse students of what they think science is in high school."

"The faculty think science is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of the past 200 years," Kelley said. "To have our students go forth in the world without it is a travesty."