Expanding the Nature of Science in Teaching Laboratories: From Ethology to Investigating Animal Behavior

 

Ralph Preszler

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2004, Volume 25

Abstract

The instructor’s section of this chapter considers some of the general challenges associated with converting a descriptive laboratory exercise to an inquiry exercise. It also contains the detailed methods of our current version of this animal behavior investigation. The second major section of this chapter contains the current student’s version of this exercise. In this section students are led through initial observations of crickets and through the process of hypothesis formation about relationships between dominance hierarchies and mating behaviors. They then design and conduct an experiment using crickets to evaluate their hypothesis.

Keywords:  animal behavior, cricket, arthropods, dominance, mate choice, insects

University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2003)