The call for evidence-based research in education has accelerated in recent years, accompanied by the need to examine the nature of inquiry into student learning. Donovan and Pellegrino (2003) make a strong appeal to improve the quality of classroom research, stating that “education needs high-quality research if the results are to be reliable for the purposes of improving practice”. The challen...
Reading and discussing primary literature is central to communicating science. Students need practice in reading the literature for purposes beyond gaining information. Literature can be used to both increase knowledge and comprehension and to engage students in higher-level thinking (Bloom 1956; Levine 2001; Gillen et al. 2004; Finelli et al. 2005). Because science is also about making...
Ecologists attempt to establish general principles from a vast range of organizational, spatial, and temporal scales (Belovsky et al. 2004). The process of developing generalities in ecology involves two approaches often not addressed in introductory science courses – inductive and deductive. One way of thinking about this is to consider the inductive approach as examining particular cases an...
Urban ecology is quickly becoming a major subdiscipline in ecology and being included in the syllabi of most college-level ecology courses. This field and laboratory exercise is designed to be easily modified for use in any area that has a gradient of human density, from urban to rural. In addition, the exercise is designed to 1) cover major organizational levels in ecology, from organisms to...
The Kids Into Discovering Science (KiDS) curriculum, designed for 5th grade students, includes 10 classroom lesson plans and one field trip lesson plan centered on a plant science experiment. Over 10 lessons and a field day, students practice observation, set up and monitor an experiment, analyze and present their data, and learn about plant ecology, soil ecology, habitats, and their local...
Publisher: EcoEd Digital Library PlantEd Digital Library