The purpose of this research was to determine how dendrochronology can be used in an experiential unit to enhance high school students understanding of environmental change. Dendrochronology, the visual examination of tree ring cross sections provides opportunities to relate environmental change to growth patterns of trees and can be used to show the students both how scientists can investigate the past and how the environment can affect trees. Students engaged in a 10-day unit that employed a variety of constructivist learning activities to investigate environmental change, climate change, and tree growth. The culminating activity was student-created experiments that investigated various aspects of the relationship of trees to their environment.
This research was a mixed method design and was conducted at a small public high school in the Deep South. The school is a Title One school on a four by four block schedule and is located in a rural area where forestry is one of the major industries. Twenty five juniors and seniors who were members of two environmental science classes were the participants in the research.
As evaluated by the Wilcoxon matched-pair signed rank test, students scored significantly higher on the posttest (P < .01) than on the pretest with average scores of 9.52 on the pretest and 18.76 on the posttest. Most of these gains were in questions that evaluated the students understanding of climate change, tree anatomy and statistical analyses of tree growth data. The qualitative components of the research supported that these were the areas of greatest growth and revealed that the students greatly enjoyed participating in investigations of their own.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-05162007-100031 |
| Date | 04 June 2007 |
| Creators | McCormick, Cynthia Stager |
| Contributors | Cornelis F. de Hoop, Pamela B. Blanchard, Earl H. Cheek, Rita Culross, Terrie Poehl, James H. Wandersee |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-05162007-100031/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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