THE ACS REFORM OF INTRODUCTORY SCIENCE COURSES
FOR
NON-SCIENCE MAJORS PROGRAM

Project Mission and Purpose

This initiative's mission is to:

• Increase the visibility and to sharpen the focus on issues in science education across the sixteen ACS campuses.
  
• Provide the ACS faculty with the expertise and the resources to raise the level of science literacy among non-science majors.
  
• Improve the scientific and technological understanding and skills of non-science majors.
  
• Demonstrate the value of confronting this problem through collaborative efforts among the sixteen ACS member institutions.

With funding, all sixteen ACS institutions will be invited to develop and to revise introductory science courses and related activities, to assess the value that non-major science students place on science literacy, to enhance faculty development, to identify and to integrate appropriate and creative roles for technology, and to showcase the potential impact of collaboration among faculty and institutions as they prepare students to be effective local and world citizens.

Project Objectives

There are two objectives at the heart of this undergraduate science initiative for non-majors:

1. to raise the level of science literacy of students at ACS member institutions, and
2. to demonstrate the value of confronting this difficult and perplexing problem through collaborative efforts of faculty and institutions.

These objectives will be accomplished by:

• assisting ACS member institutions in the development of new courses and in the review and redesign of existing introductory science courses for non-majors, by training faculty members in course design and assessment.
  
• expanding the orientation and mentoring of new science faculty to include special seminars to address such topics as the educational needs of non-science majors, new courses, and pedagogical approaches that are appropriate for this audience and these courses.
  
• sharing, across the consortium, the models that already have been created and tested by member institutions.
  
• developing new, experiential, investigative models for introductory, undergraduate science courses, as well as for the research, laboratory, and field-based components of such courses.
  
• identifying and including the appropriate and creative applications of existing and emerging technology in the science courses and field-based components.
  
• partnering with colleagues at Drury University to pilot the first comprehensive Science and Math Values Inventory (SaM-VI).
  
• evaluating the individual projects as well as the program as a whole and distilling best practices and lessons learned in specific courses and on the initiative as a whole.
  
• disseminating the results of this initiative within and outside the consortium, via electronic means, professional journals, presentations at professional meetings and workshops that include non-ACS institutions.

ACS Science Reform Program Homepage

This ACS program is supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles