Blueprints for Undergraduate Neuroscience Curricula: Roadmaps to What End?

Neuroscience is flourishing at undergraduate four-year institutions. During the past decade there has been a proliferation of programs and there are many institutions where such programs are recognized as centers of academic excellence. Recently, FUN held the fourth in a series of neuroscience workshops in collaboration with Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) at Macalester College. In the first of these workshops, at Davidson College in 1995, a major accomplishment was the development of a set of curricular blueprints or roadmaps for establishing undergraduate neuroscience programs. In the intervening years these blueprints have been employed by many as guidelines for the development of successful programs at diverse institutions. Many of those who attended the first Davidson workshop and were among the first generation of faculty to implement undergraduate neuroscience programs, returned as seasoned presenters at the most recent workshop. The next generation of neuroscience educators is now entering the field and many are finding positions at institutions where they are launching new programs. They want to know which of the models developed by the preceding generation of educators is best suited to their own goals and how model programs may be adapted for use at their home institutions. They are asking what practices work best and how success should be measured. At the Macalester workshop, teams re-evaluated the blueprints that had been developed at the first FUN/PKAL workshop. For the most part there seemed to be general agreement among the participants that radical revisions to the blueprints are unwarranted. There was recognition that significant advances in genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics need to be integrated into undergraduate curricula in some manner. Future articles in JUNE and a PKAL consensus paper are planned which will disseminate summaries of the workshop sessions. What I wish to address in this editorial is the need for guidelines that will be helpful in assessing the quality of the multitude of undergraduate neuroscience programs that currently exist as well as those new programs that will appear on the horizon. OK, so I said the " A " word. About now you may not be pleased that you decided to read this editorial. There are very few of us whose institutions have not had to battle the assessment juggernaut to satisfy various criteria for accreditation. I do not intend to assess the success or merit of the assessment movement. In general it is clear that assessment should play an important role …