The Integrated Biology and Inquiry Skills (IBIS) course incorporates successful strategies of scientific teaching to stress student inquiry, collaboration, critical thinking, experimentation, and application instead of only memorization and recall of vocabulary.
The course design spans the topics typically covered in an Introductory Biology course, but frames the student exploration of these topics from unique and novel perspectives. For example, the lecture component of the curriculum uses narratives designed to capture students’ attention as a framework for knowledge acquisition/construction and critical thinking. In parallel, the laboratory portion of the curriculum utilizes exclusively directed inquiry that allows students to explore foundational biological concepts with the goal of addressing a larger biological question.
This site provides the content and framework of the entire IBIS curriculum for your use (request access to the Instructor Materials here). The curriculum has been used successful at a small, liberal arts college (class sizes of 24), a medium, comprehensive university (class sizes of 60), and a large, public university (class sizes of 420). Notably lecture and laboratory experiences are designed to reinforce the other, but the curriculum is entirely modular so please feel free to use lecture, laboratory, lecture and laboratory, or individual pieces of either in order to meet your needs.
Please feel free to contact any member of the team with questions regarding the IBIS curricular materials or their suggested use.