Somewhere, deep in the sawgrass blazing green under the summer sun, a killer lurked.
Moments before, school teachers Michelle Hill and Amber Koney crunched ashore a salt-marsh island in New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay in a fiberglass skiff with a handful of other educators-turned-summer researchers. They toted stakes and a wire cage, excited to protect the eggs they had watched a diamondback terrapin — a near-threatened turtle species — lay the day before in a slightly raised bare patch of dry sand.
Now the 13-inch-deep hole was empty. Around it, scratches in the sand and tracks from something much bigger than a turtle. As Koney inspected the hole, Hill, hands on her hips, looked out over the marsh, but only the wind moved, making white ripples in the sawgrass.
Experiences such as this are the essence of the QUEST program run by Princeton University’s Program in Teacher Preparation in collaboration with the departments of geosciences and of ecology and evolutionary biology. Each summer, select K-12 science teachers from New Jersey such as Hill and Koney become the students, spending a week with university-level researchers in the lab experimenting, or in the field observing and collecting evidence for self-designed research projects.
This summer QUEST included a program based at the state-owned Lighthouse Center for Natural Resource Education in Waretown, N.J., where teachers carried out research related to diamondback-terrapin conservation (see video). A second, experiment-based program held on Princeton’s campus and led by Princeton Assistant Professor of Geosciences David Medvigy focused on human impacts on local climate.
In keeping with its long-form name — Questioning Underlies Effective Science Teaching — the program is intended to help participants become more effective teachers by becoming more inquisitive scientists, said Anne Catena, the Teacher Prep Program’s director of professional development. Like any researcher, the teachers must think through, adjust to and even pursue the uncertainties of research. The teachers take back to their students the importance of learning through active and open thinking.
“This program is built on the importance of being able to pose and ask questions, and gather evidence from the data to discover or learn something,” Catena said. “That gets the learner more involved in the process instead of just being a receptacle of information.”
For the July 8-12 Lighthouse Center session, the teachers were provided with everything they needed for a week in New Jersey’s coastal pine forest — except answers, said Koney, a third-grade teacher at Dutch Neck Elementary School in West Windsor. “They don’t answer our questions and we have to figure out everything for ourselves,” she said. “As a teacher you also don’t want to give kids the answer — they need to find the path themselves. It can be tempting to just tell the answers, but that’s not allowing the kids to figure things out.”
Staying connected to nature also is important, said Hill, a seventh-grade science teacher at Hillsborough Middle School, who aims to foster a respect for the natural world in her students. Fond of turtles since she was little, Hill hopes to have turtles in the classroom, and what she learns at QUEST will help her make it more educational.
“I want them to have that experience not only for teaching responsibility, but also for teaching them respect for living things other than humans because the age group I teach struggles with that sometimes. They’re very much an indoor generation,” Hill said.
The pillaged nest gave Koney and Hill a lot to try to figure out. For their project, the two teachers explored whether predators of terrapin nests can be identified by scratch and dig patterns as well as by droppings, or scat. A camera set up to monitor the nest had captured the culprit — a red fox!
With the predator identified, Koney and Hill searched for evidence unique to a fox. Because all the eggs were gone, they wanted to know if that means foxes eat them whole, and if that differs from the habits of other turtle-egg scavengers such as raccoons. There was only one way to know.
“Actually, the daring raid helped us,” said Hill as she and Koney combed the ground nearby for egg-laden fox feces. When the teams presented their results at the end of the week, Hill and Koney reported that foxes and raccoons ravage nests in distinct ways. Thus predators can indeed be identified by footprints and scat, which may sometimes be better than other methods for documenting past nest violations.
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In QUEST, Questions Are The Answer to Better Teaching,
