Honeybees, butterflies, and ladybugs all have fascinating mutually beneficial relationships with plants and play important ecosystem roles. Children also love these creatures. But how do we teach children about these symbiotic interactions and help them appreciate their vital roles in our environment? One must is to give children direct experience…

For several years, the author's fifth-grade students raised and observed plants, kept journals, and analyzed the functions of the parts of a plant. But this year, a near disaster taught her a lesson and increased the value of the activity for her students. Not only did students learn about plants, they now understand what a variable is and how…

Building on the home cultural practices related to science can facilitate scientific literacy development of preschoolers. Using a sociocognitive and sociocultural approach and "funds of knowledge" as a theoretical framework, this article describes how Mexican American parents and young children identified the science concepts and knowledge…

The following experiment describes an easy experiment for children 11-12 years old, performed during spring in a compulsory school near Karlstad, Sweden. Four different ripe fruits were placed under flowering plants of Impatiens New Guinea (Impatiens hawkeri) for four days on a table and with plastic bags around both plants and fruits. For one of…

The Oregon 4-H Wildlife Stewards program has been training teachers and volunteers to convert school grounds to education sites by constructing schoolyard wildlife habitats since 1997. The publication "What Can We Learn at the Pond? 4-H Wildlife Stewards Master Leader Guide" (Bourdeau 2004a) was written to support the program's focus on developing…

In the project presented in this article, high school students create and observe miniecosystems in an ecology unit designed around a 5E (engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation) instructional model. Students choose a wide variety of organisms and use creativity to design miniecosystems. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

More than 90% of vascular plants in terrestrial ecosystems form symbiotic root-fungal associations known as mycorrhiza; in Mediterranean biomes all known mycorrhizal types co-exist. However, the understanding of mycorrhizal diversity and structure and their ecophysiological impact in soil productivity and conservation has been shown to be very…

Animal and plant species identification is often emphasized as a basic prerequisite for an understanding of ecology and training identification skills seems a worthwhile task in biology education. Such identification tasks could be embedded into hands-on, group-based and self-determined learning: a) Teaching and learning should make use of a small…

In our college course, "Life Science for Elementary School Teachers," our investigation assesses the germination success of an invasive plant, purple loosestrife, compared to native wildflowers. Topics addressed include the scientific method, experimental design, seed dormancy, plant competition, ethno-botany, and success of non-native plants. The…

Students love outdoor activities and will love them even more when they build confidence in their tree identification and measurement skills. Through these activities, students will learn to identify the major characteristics of trees and discover how the pace--a nonstandard measuring unit--can be used to estimate not only distances but also the…

Water is very important to plants. Plants need water to produce food and grow. Plants make their own food through a complex, sunlight-powered process called photosynthesis. Simply put, in photosynthesis, water absorbed by a plant's roots and carbon dioxide taken from the air by a plant's leaves combine to make the plant's food. This article…

When students use plants to investigate cellular respiration, they confront the misconception that plants only "perform" photosynthesis (Driver et. al., 1994). Because this is such a strong misconception, several experiences with plant respiration are needed before students accept the idea that plants use some of the food from photosynthesis. Part…

Many plant biologists claim that there is a tremendous bias towards the study of animals in science curricula, however, there is even less attention given to topics on fungi. On average, Biology laboratory manuals will have only one fungi exercise, and most of the time, it is mainly descriptive. As we developed this exercise we realized how much…

This paper reports on a case study with three dyads of high school students (age 14 years) each collaborating on a plant growth modeling task in the computer-supported educational environment "ModelsCreator". Following a qualitative line of research, the present study aims at highlighting the ways in which the collaborating students as well as the…

Bioassays are commonly used to test the biological activity of chemicals and other exercises are presented in which students synthesize plant hormones. Lab exercise is conducted using commercially available auxins and auxin regulating compounds.