Physiology for the 21^st Century
A Sourcebook of Effective and Economical Experiments

Experiment Development

Development and editing of the activities began at the IUPS workshop in April 2005, where participants learned how to revise cookbook experiments to make them more discovery or project-based, how to teach students about data analysis and data presentation, and other aspects of laboratory curriculum planning and development.

The experiments in their initial form needed significant revision and adaptation for a variety of reasons:

• Some of the experiments use mammals, and such experiments can no longer be considered inexpensive or simple because of the requirements for animal care.
• Some of the experiments with human subjects carry unacceptable risk, and would not receive approval from U.S. Human Subjects Committees today.
• The quality and ease of use of the experiments is uneven. Some activities are not well-explained or lack adequate instructions.
• The educational value of the experiments needs improvement. The activities do not explain the physiology concepts that can be learned from them and do not include suggestions for discovery or inquiry activities or for project laboratories. Many of the experiment instructions are in cookbook format.

The co-investigators created instructions and a template for formatting activities. Key components of the template include the physiology and learning objectives of the activity, equipment and supply lists, suggestions for how to do the experiment, expected results and their physiological explanations, follow-up activities, and safety and precautions.

The initial activities developed by the team have been posted as a model, and the Project Team would now like to invite all members of the physiology community to write activities for the project. All contributions will be reviewed and edited by one of the project editors prior to submission to the APS Archive of Teaching Resources (www.apsarchive.org). Once submitted to the Archive, the submission will go through a second peer-review process for scientific accuracy prior to acceptance and posting online. Authors may be asked to revise their submission at any stage of the peer-review process.

If you are interested in contributing to the project, please contact Dee Silverthorn at silverthorn@mail.utexas.edu with your ideas prior to beginning work.

The APS Education Office catalogs and uploads each of the developed activities into the APS Archive of Teaching Resources. Activities can be downloaded as Word files, making it possible for teachers to modify an activity into a student-ready exercise. In addition, the Archive page for an activity may contain links to relevant on-line journal articles, taking advantage of the dynamic nature of electronic publication.

Each Archive activity also has associated with it a comment box and rating system. As teachers download and implement the activities, their modifications, revisions, extensions, and critiques can be posted to the Archive website. Student versions created by users can be submitted for review and posted to the APS site, thus allowing the 21st Century Project to grow.

The dynamic nature of electronic publication requires that someone maintain responsibility for the 21st Century Project collection beyond the years funded by the grant. The co-investigators and senior personnel on the grant are all active in the APS Teaching Section and the IUPS Education Committee, and they have solicited volunteers from those organizations to help maintain a pool of reviewers and contributors, similar to what is being done for other contributions to the APS Archive.