Student intern: Rowan Kehrer (Biology, Earth Sciences)
Supervisors: Lydia Cole (School of Geography and Sustainable Development), Hannah Worthington (School of Mathematics and Statistics)
It is widely acknowledged that biodiversity is under threat. Children are being taught this in Schools, but not, simultaneously, seeing how we monitor temporal change and how losses may be reversed. Our overarching research question is: how can we support engagement with, and monitoring of, biodiversity within primary schools?
With growing threats to our global environment, it is critical we instil respect and enthusiasm for the environment from a young age. Citizen/community science plays a large role in biodiversity monitoring worldwide. There are many existing surveillance schemes that depend on civilian collected data, many of which pertain directly to schools. By examining the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence we identified the learning objectives pertaining to biodiversity, ecology, statistics, and other quantitative subjects.
With these curriculum objectives in mind, we started to develop a set of activities that build students’ relationship with nature by helping them become more aware of their environment and simultaneously learning skills for them to connect with their environment. The activities introduce the concept of biodiversity and some of its indicators through hands-on monitoring of the local area. There are 3 different modules focusing on plants, invertebrates, and birds respectively. Each module includes at least 2 activities for both Level 1 learners (Primary 2 – Primary 4) and Level 2 learners (Primary 5 – Primary 7).
Each activity begins with a paragraph introducing the concepts pertaining to that activity. Some activities have slideshows for the teachers to present, which include more complex or potentially novel information. After students have some familiarity with the material, most activities take them outside to collect data for themselves, followed by suggestions for how the data might be visualised. Worksheets guide students through reflections on what their data tells them, how their data demonstrates biodiversity (or lack of it), and how it pertains to the local area.
We hope that with these activities, students will learn about biodiversity in a manner that encourages further interest and passion for our environment.