- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1439902
- First Name William
- Last Name Falkner
- Institution North Dakota State University
- Role/Position Other: Postdoctoral Researcher
- Proposal Type Workshop
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Data Science, Life Sciences
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Lessons learned from developing/implementing a Track 1 project / Track 2 project / Track 3 project / or Track 4 Research project, STEM content and/or convergent skills development
Goals
Our goals are for participants to: (1) Become familiar with digitized natural history collections, (2) access and manage large, digital datasets, and (3) combine data competency standards with biological sciences objectives and science practices to offer students authentic research experiences in the classroom.
Evidence
Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) were initially developed to provide more opportunities for science major students to engage in research. Since their conception, CUREs have also been implemented for nonmajor science education, utilizing the authentic research experience to scaffold scientific practices and content knowledge. However, these experiences often require expensive laboratory equipment, large amounts of class time, or expertise in a narrow field of study. Digitized natural history collections provide a space for easily downloadable datasets for students to investigate a wide variety of biological questions. These datasets also introduce students to concepts revolving data literacy as they tackle real-world, messy datasets to make sense out of raw data. These classroom activities have been implemented at our university for the last four years and this workshop aims to share these classroom activities along with data collected over those four years along with rationale to include such activities at a younger age demographic.
Proposal
In an age of big data, it becomes clear that there is a need for data literacy education at all levels of education. However, data collection and analysis at the secondary level is often limited to small classroom experiments. Digitized natural history collections offer a way to provide students and educators with sufficiently large data sets for answering a variety of biological questions while, at the same time, teaching students about managing large data sets and offering a view of the messiness of real-world data. This presentation will demonstrate how to implement digitized natural history collections in the classroom, provide tutorials on how to access these collections, discuss how to use these data sets to leverage disciplinary core ideas and science practices as well as a student’s own curiosity.
