BERG > Project NEXUS UMCP > Papers and Presentations

Presentations at the National Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), The Beauty and Benefits of Science, Boston, MA, February 14-18, 2013.

Symposium presentation

The NEXUS/Physics Class: What does physics have to offer biology and pre-medical students?

Edward F. Redish
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Research biologists and medical schools are calling for universities to revise and upgrade the undergraduate curriculum for biology and pre-medical students.* The critical issues they have identified include modernizing the course, coordinating with other disciplines, and focusing on helping students to develop scientific competencies. As part of the National Experiment on Undergraduate Science (NEXUS),** a four-university collaboration supported by HHMI, physicists, biologists, and science education specialists at the University of Maryland (UMd) are designing a new course in Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences.

The UMd team is both building on our many years of experience in Physics Education Research and working closely in intensive discussions and negotiations with experts in physics, biology, chemistry, and medicine. We focus on the scientific competencies and ways of thinking that physicists typically include in their introductory classes but that are rarely stressed in introductory biology and chemistry classes. These include: quantitative symbolic reasoning, blending mathematical and qualitative reasoning, abstraction to the level of toy models in order to build intuitions, and order-of-magnitude estimation. In our NEXUS physics course for life science majors we are learning how to reframe physics and physicist-like thinking to make it both plausible and productive for biology and pre-medical students.

The content of the course includes many more topics that are relevant to biology than is traditional, such as diffusion, fluid dynamics, and chemical reactions and binding, and some traditional topics that are more appropriate for mechanical engineers than for biologists are omitted. Micro-macro connections are stressed throughout. The epistemology and pedagogy are modified to focus on competency building, and a strong effort is made to develop examples that are authentic to biology and chemistry – where learning the physics helps students develop of stronger understanding of important topics introduced in other science classes. These changes feed back into the biology and chemistry curricula, suggesting a helix of coordinated reforms enriching the instructional program for biologists and pre-meds.

* Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (AAMC, 2009);

** Project NEXUS UMCP