Honors Biology is a course designed to instill in students an appreciation for the living world and its complexity through direct experiences. It prepares students to take Advanced Biology or a rigorous freshman-level college biology course. An all-class collaborative bioassessment of a local stream or river investigation runs through the fall term; to evaluate the water quality, students collect, identify, and evaluate the significance of a sampled community of riffle-dwelling benthic macroinvertebrates. In the process, with evolution by natural selection as the underlying principle, students develop an understanding of community and population ecology and the importance of biodiversity. Making the invisible visible and tangible is the theme running through the next season of biology where we dive into the essential elements of living organisms, cellular biochemistry and cell structure to provide a foundation for understanding higher levels of biological organization. Insights are wrought by modeling complex cellular processes and learning how to design and conduct controlled experiments involving enzymes and the metabolic processes of respiration and photosynthesis. Finally, the nature of inheritance and the role of DNA in controlling cell functions and organismal traits begins the final stage of the course. The class culminates with the study of plant systems, with students utilizing the surrounding campus to better understand plant growth, reproduction, and propagation.  

Departmental approval is required for this course. Students who have achieved a B+ or better in Honors Chemistry are best prepared for this course.