As members of a 3-4 person research team, students work each week on some stage of designing or carrying out their own experiments on plant or animal physiology. During the semester, each team has 3 opportunities to develop an experiment to test a hypothesis based on a novel research question, in many cases using themselves as subjects (e.g. electrocardiograms, respiration rate, electroencephalograms). Research topics are chosen by students and reflect concepts taught concurrently in the Organismal Biology (323) lecture course. We will stress different elements of experimental design (development of good questions, review of relevant literature, hypothesis formation, protocol development: randomization, blinding, controls, sample size estimation) and analysis (data manipulation, graphing, statistical tests, comparison with previous findings). Emphasis is on critical thinking required in designing and conducting experiments and in analyzing and interpreting results. During the semester, research teams report their findings through oral PowerPoint presentations and by writing, peer-reviewing, and revising papers in the format of scientific journal articles.