Journal #7

Leapin' Lizards!: Students as Data Collectors
Edutopia
By Diane Petersen
April 2005

This is an article written by a fourth grade science teacher in Washington State. She was bored with her usual curriculum and decided to integrate "nature mapping"- a hands-on nationwide program where animals are tracked and observed in their own environment. Her students were able to do this with the help of the local farmers in an effort to find and track "horny toads." There were documented reports from the 1930's that these lizards were going extinct, but local sightings among her students said that maybe these findings were inaccurate. By utilizing NatureMapping, every time a horny toad is spotted, it is recorded either on paper or by phone, and then put into a database that will keep track of the information. Over time, the lizards were found to live on private property as well as uninhabited areas and they were even able to discover some other information about how they live in the winter. Overall this experiment involves the local community, gives the students a hands-on real life handle on science, and also accomplishes some very important information gathering. Most of all, the students love it!

1.) Would this be possible in schools where funding is low?
Answer: It does seem to be an expensive program that requires the software and computers forthe class to use. For Mrs. Petersen's class, they received a grant from Bill Gates in order to make this happen. A teacher who wanted to use this would have to find funding from somewhere and probably would have to petition the community.

2.) What if the community wasn't willing to participate?
Answer: I think that if you generate an interest there will always be willing participants. It also depends on the issue. Maybe there is a red-ant problem in the neighborhood behind the school, and if so, some of the residents may be willing to report to the students what types of bugs eat them, etc...If there really is very little interest in what the students are trying to accomplish, than the teacher can re-direct the project into something that the community will embrace.