Preface

Summary

This volume contains twenty-six articles on mathematics pedagogy for life science students, representing twenty-two institutions from large research universities to community colleges. While many of the articles discuss projects designed to fit a particular niche at a particular institution, each emphasizes lessons learned that could be applied elsewhere. The articles are sorted into three themes, Models, Processes, and Directions, as described in the General Introduction that follows the table of contents, and in the editorial introductions to the three parts. Curricular development in mathematics for biology is occurring at a variety of levels, including advanced undergraduate courses, interdisciplinary courses, alternatives to the standard calculus sequence, and complete curricula. Articles in the Models and Processes sections focus on curriculum projects on one of these levels. The division of the articles into two groups was motivated by the observation, made by many of the authors, that successful innovation in mathematics pedagogy for biology requires more than a good pedagogical idea. Several excellent projects have failed to become established because they could not attract sufficient enrollment or have fallen into disuse because they could not be institutionalized. We wanted to present them as outstanding models while addressing the reasons for their failure.