Providing students with authentic opportunities for hands-on investigation is well established as a best practice in undergraduate science education. Centering those investigations on a relatively limited number of model systems that are integrated into the curriculum allows students the opportunity to build incremental skills with a familiar system. This adds depth and greater meaning to the research experience. At Carroll College, we have focused student investigations in our Principles of Ecology and Evolution course on the behavior and population ecology of amphipods (Gammarus pseudolimnaeus). Each semester, students begin with a semi-structured project in which the research question is presented by the course instructor. Later in the semester, students are given the opportunity to develop and test their own research question.
Results/Conclusions
Several of these students have gone on to independently design further investigations with amphipods for their senior capstone projects, some of which have led to professional presentations and publication. This poster will describe the logistics of working with amphipods, the types of investigations students have developed, and factors that make amphipods particularly useful as a model organism for biological investigations.
