Literate about biodiversity:
NatureMapping Takes Kids - and Technology - Outside and into Active Learning
A data-collection program brings real science to school -- and startles the professionals.
By Diane Petersen I
an’s work as a scientist began with a contradiction: “The scientists said that you can’t find any horny toads here. And I said, ‘My dad and I go out and catch them.’” The 13-year- old has now traveled to Idaho and California, where he and
three classmates surprised working scientists by describing new discoveries about where the 3-inch-long lizards live and what they eat. “One man said that we presented better than most col- lege students did,” says Ian.
Ian is one of more than a dozen of my students at Water- ville Elementary School, in Waterville, Washington, who have spoken at scientific conferences throughout the country. Their subject: short-horned lizards (Phrynosoma douglasii), also called horny toads, which are native to our rural area and are a part of my students’ world. The creatures aren’t an obvious vehicle for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. But through their work on horny toads as part of a nationwide project called Na- tureMapping, my students honed those very skills and made a real contribution to science. Before my fourth-grade class began collecting data in 1997,
there were fewer than 100 documented lizard sightings, and most came from projects in the 1930s and ‘40s. Those records showed that the elusive reptiles existed only on undeveloped land, but this data was wrong, probably because no one had sampled private property. In just a few years, my students have quadrupled the number of documented sightings and shown that the lizards thrive on farmland. In addition,
we have shaken up decades-old as- sumptions about the animals’ habitat and diet. For example, according to scientific literature, the lizards are specially adapted to eat ants, but in our observations they clearly preferred small grasshoppers. Besides, farmers say they see few ants in
CLEARING 2011
their fields for the lizards to eat. Those findings were presented at the Wildlife Society Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting, held in March 2000 in Post Falls, Idaho, where a grateful scientific community accepted the students and their data. (See also the presentation by Waterville Elementary School students at the 2003 NatureMapping National Meeting. (46.4 MB))
A Day in the Life of a Horny Toad
Even though our NatureMapping project is designed to fill gaps in existing information about where certain plant and ani- mal species are located (see “How To: Start Counting Critters”), we didn’t set out to challenge accepted scientific wisdom. In fact, when NatureMapping first became part of my classroom, it was in a very different form.
Shortly after I began working at Waterville, I was handed a binder of lessons to get me started teaching elementary school science. I quickly realized that the curriculum was boring and shallow. We had to do something different. I signed up for a Na- tureMapping workshop, and that got me started incorporating the program into my curriculum, beginning with birds, because I knew a lot of bird-watchers. The kids would bring in their own sightings and team with birders by phone to record what species they saw, and where. We would write up the information and email it to Karen Dvornich, the NatureMapping coordinator at the University of Washington, who added it to a growing collec- tion of data about sites where common Washington species are found.
One day, Dvornich visited our classroom, and the students
In just a few years, students have dramatically increased scientists’ understanding of the horny toad.
were talking about the short-horned lizards they often saw. Dvornich got excited, because the lizards were considered an at- risk species, so we started making lizards the focus of our work. We’ve been expanding the program ever since. At first, I thought the students could collect the information themselves near their homes over the summer. Unfortunately, they would often forget or would look at the wrong time. I’ve never been shy about asking for help, and I thought that the farmers in our community could make the observations we needed. So, in 1999, I asked my students to make a list of every farmer they knew, and we mailed out invitations to be part of our school project. For six years now, my students have worked with farmers in the community who agree to collect data about where and when they see the lizards in their fields. We start by imagining
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