Category: Science Methods
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Can Plants Learn?
An experiment to determine if plants could learn by association Identify key features, such as variables, controls. Based on a real experiment in Nature.com.
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Falling Cats – CER
Students practice Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) while examining the relationship between falling height and cat injuries. The graphs show that cats who fall 2-7 stories often suffer more injuries than cats who fall from greater distances. Not much information is given about how the data was collected, though the original source is included, I…
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Early Discoveries – CER
Explore historical scientific discoveries, like Pasteur’s experiments to learn about the scientific method.
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The Martian and the Car
This worksheet is one of the older ones in my collection, and was recently updated to include a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning section (instead of short response/essay). This a a great way to introduce the topic of life and how we define whether something is living or not. In this scenario, a Martian is observing earth and decides…
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DataClassroom
High school biology classrooms often lack the time and resources to do long term studies and data collection that researchers engage in. Luckily for us, many projects make their data available for use by schools. Organizations like HHMI and Data Nuggets have created student resources that focus on analyzing real scientific data. One of these…
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Exploration: An Inquiry Activity on the Dubia Roach
A short activity for day one in the science class. Give students a live animal to observe, like a dubia roach. They write observations, questions, and make inferences to share with the class.
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Experimental Design
Students in most science classes start with an overview of scientific processes. For advanced students, I use this cheat sheet to remind them of the major features of the scientific method, such as a control group, dependent and independent variables. AP Bio students are also introduced to the concept of the null and alternative hypotheses…
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Fortune Telling Fish
This activity is perfect for a first day or as an introduction to the scientific method. Though there isn’t quite as much cooperation as the “Saving Sam” activity, the fortune telling fish allows students to explore the nature of science together. The handout linked can be given to students, or you can also project them…
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StoryLab – Microscope “E”
This Storylab aligns with a basic microscope lab where students learn the parts of the microscope and locate the letter “e’ on a prepared slide.
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Independent & Dependent Variables Practice
Students reach short scenarios about scientific experiments. They identify the controls and variables in each story.
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Reinforcement: Scientific Processes
I designed this worksheet for an introductory biology class. It reinforces concepts that are introduced in the first chapter. Students learn about how science works, what a hypothesis is, and how data is analyzed. Reinforcement worksheets have definitions or sentences that include a key word and students much choose from a bank of vocabulary words…
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Investigation: How Does a Water Strider Stay Afloat?
This lab was modified from the “Penny Lab” to focus more on the properties of water and how surface tension is important for aquatic organisms like the water strider. The instructions were designed for an intro (vocational) biology class that only meets for a semester.
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Investigation: How Do Insects Move?
Have you ever thought about how insects with 6 legs actually crawl? Human movement on two legs is pretty simple: left-right-left-right, but all insects have 6 legs attached to a thorax. In this activity, I ask students to observe an insect closely, usually a dubia roach.
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Penny Lab: Soap and Surface Tension
Most science classes begin the year with an exercise on the scientific method. It can be difficult to plan a short activity that will reinforce the main ideas of developing and testing a hypothesis. This lab is simple and doesn’t require much in the way of materials: pennies, water, and pipettes (and paper towels for…
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Graphing Hand Span and Height
This exercise illustrates the difference between bar graphs and scatter plots and walks students through the process of representing data they collect.