SGER: Connections between Mathematics and Biology in the High Schools: An Experimental Program

This exploratory program will investigate ways to connect the mathematical and biological sciences in high school classrooms. The program will have a major instructional materials development component through a module-writing activity and through a research experience for high school teachers.

Teachers will learn about mathematical biology, then will use their knowledge to construct modules for classroom use. They will work with content experts in mathematics and biology, and will try their modules in their own classrooms. Other teachers will try the same modules in different classrooms. The modules will then be revised and disseminated.

Intellectual Merit: The focus will be on topics from computational biology and bioinformatics. Teachers will learn about sequence alignment algorithms, finding the smallest number of mutations of a certain type to switch one sequence into another, algorithms for finding a sequence from its fragments, and other mathematical techniques. Specific topics will involve trees, DNA fragment assembly, phylogenetic trees, tree parsimony and genome rearrangements. Research projects for teachers will center around physical mapping and the shortest common superstring problem. Research in teaching and learning will inform the program, and in turn the program will provide new insights into the process of interdisciplinary learning.

Broader Impact: The program will train a group of teachers to develop at the interface between the biological and mathematical sciences and to bring interdisciplinary activities back to their schools. It will disseminate the results widely through materials, presentations at conferences, a website and a report. Teachers will learn about the nature of interdisciplinary research by doing it.