A Directed Research Project Investigating Territoriality & Aggression in Crickets

Abstract

Providing students with hands-on experience designing experiments, conducting research, analyzing results, and presenting their findings should be an important component of science classes. However, students rarely have the opportunity to conduct independent research. Frequently laboratories have structured exercises where the instructor provides the research question and the experimental procedures. These structured laboratories provide students with only part of the scientific research process. I have found that many students do not have a thorough unders tanding of the sc ient i f ic research process because they have never experienced the entire scientific process for themselves. As an alternative to the traditional ‘‘cook-book’’ laboratories, a number of authors have discussed inquiry-based learning approaches where students are expected to pose their own research questions and devise their own experiments to answer those questions (e.g. Grant & Vatnick 1998; McGraw 1999; Ahern-Rindell 1998). However, authors have noted that biology departments seem to lag behind these reform efforts (Grant & Vatnick 1998; Sunberg & Armstrong 1993). I have found that one challenge in performing inquirybased investigations is that students often lack the experience and confidence necessary for open-ended inquiry-based investigations. I teach an Animal Behavior class that provides students with an opportunity to gain experience designing and conducting their own independent research projects. A large portion of the course is devoted to independent research projects designed and con-