This Experiment, students collect soil samples to test hypotheses about the diversity of invertebrates in soil in different places or under different conditions. Students generate their own hypotheses, and the activity is adaptable to available local conditions, such as different forest types, different stages of succession, or areas with and without impacts such as logging or wind damage....
Forests play an important role in the U.S. and global carbon cycle, and carbon sequestered by U.S. forest growth and harvested wood products currently offsets 12-19% of U.S. fossil fuel emissions. The cycle of forest growth, death, and regeneration and the use of wood removed from the forest complicate efforts to understand and measure forest carbon pools and flows. Our report explains these...
All ecology texts include figures showing carbon cycles of various types (terrestrial, marine, global, etc). However, education research shows that introductory level students (both college and high school) and many citizens do not understand the biological and ecological processes that are the foundation for these cycles.
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...
In this activity, students will play the role of a field biologist quantifying and explaining animal behavior using the scientific method (observation – hypothesis – prediction – test). Powerpoint slides contain a series of photos of scavengers at deer carcasses. Students will form hypotheses about the behavioral interactions in the photos, then make predictions that could be used to test their...
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