HR: 1340h
AN: ED23B-1296    [Abstracts]
TI: Using Soil Incubation Experiments to Enhance Urban Elementary School Student Understanding of Carbon Cycling
AU: * Whittinghill, K A
EM: whit0924@umn.edu
AF: University of Minnesota, 100 Ecology 1987 Upper Buford Circle, Saint Paul, MN 55414, United States
AU: van Vleck, H E
EM: vanv0057@umn.edu
AF: University of Minnesota, 100 Ecology 1987 Upper Buford Circle, Saint Paul, MN 55414, United States
AU: Dechaine, J M
EM: dech0022@umn.edu
AF: University of Minnesota, Room 250 BioSci 6022 1445 Gortner Ave., Saint Paul, MN 55414, United States
AU: Faber, N
EM: NICK.FABER@spps.org
AF: John A. Johnson Elementary School, 740 York Ave., Saint Paul, MN 55106, United States
AB: Soil incubations provide a simple and low-cost way to introduce inquiry into the elementary school curriculum. As part of the University of Minnesota's NSF-funded GK-12 program, we used a replicated soil experiment to enhance a unit on global warming and carbon cycling for a 4th grade enrichment group at an urban elementary school. After completing several global warming related, inquiry based activities, the students designed an experiment to test their hypothesis that increasing temperature increases soil respiration. Students used soil from the playground placed at different temperatures within the school (computer server room, classroom, and refrigerator) to carry out their experiment. With the help of GK-12 graduate fellows, students used an infrared gas analyzer to quantify the production of carbon dioxide by the soil within mason jars. The students analyzed their data and discussed the relevance of their findings to previous lessons on global climate change. We will discuss the incubation experiment in the context of our collaboration between scientists and elementary school classrooms, inquiry based science education, and our 4th grade unit on global climate change.
DE: 0486 Soils/pedology (1865)
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design
DE: 0825 Teaching methods
DE: 1615 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling (0412, 0414, 0793, 4805, 4912)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting