Copy the page URI to the clipboard
Haresnape, Janet M; Gauci, Hannah and Taylor, Vicky J
(2024).
Abstract
For students unable to participate in field trips because of mobility or anxiety issues or limited access to outdoor spaces, lack of field work opportunities can be a huge disadvantage. Provision of a range of video resources - to enable design of their own experiment from which they can make observations - provides an authentic field work experience, far more valuable than simply analysing data collected by someone else. Students devise a testable hypothesis, select appropriate videos, make observations, undertake pilot studies, refine their method, record results, analyse their data using an appropriate statistical test, interpret the results and draw conclusions.
Plain Language Summary
Students unable to participate in field trips because of mobility or anxiety issues use video footage to explore relationships between numbers of insect visitors and an environmental variable (e.g. temperature, wind speed, humidity) or to compare visits to different coloured varieties of a flowering plant species. If the video footage is sufficiently clear, they can focus on a particular insect species, use screenshots to confirm identifications, and relate their results to known preferences and habits of a particular species of insect. They devise a hypothesis which they can test, then select video footage which will enable them to do so using an appropriate statistical test. This provides an authentic field work experience for students who would otherwise have to analyse data which had been collected by someone else.