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This article details the aim, development, and implementation of the Chemistry-Genetics Course Collaborative (CGCC), a cotaught offering of a human genetics course with an honors introductory chemistry course. The CGCC was formed to fully integrate the two courses, along with the associated chemistry lab, to create an interdisciplinary scientific community among the students and their professors. The design of the courses was purposefully aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, incorporating its interwoven strands of disciplinary core ideas, scientific practices, and crosscutting concepts. This article represents Part I of the research and contains the original interdisciplinary plan for the semester, along with the revised schedule after repeated, unified, and purposeful attempts by both faculty members to encourage students to buy into the course design were largely unsuccessful. Detailed descriptions of course assessments and rubrics, issues to be considered in designing such a nontraditional course structure, and reflections on the experience of implementing one are also included. Part II of the research, to be published separately, will focus on the analysis of assessment, attitude, and interview data.

Educational research focused on questioning techniques used in classroom settings is quite extensive. However, research regarding a teacher's ability to generate research questions is virtually nonexistent. Posing research or "testable" questions is a key component of inquiry-based instruction, and teachers must be able to both generate these questions and examine the validity of the questions students pose. This study examines preservice elementary teachers' ability to generate a testable question using data made accessible online through the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and Michigan Sea Grant. A rubric was developed to analyze the quality of the questions generated by preservice teachers in two different courses, one feeding into the next. Most students were able to generate testable questions whether they received specific instruction or not. However, writing an exemplar testable question was more difficult. Therefore, preservice elementary teachers need more opportunities to conduct authentic research design. (Contains 3 figures and 3 tables.)