| Abstract | Scientific teaching encourages students to think critically in order to synthesize and apply the presented information to a new problem or scenario. These skills are becoming increasingly important in today’s society where we are faced with many complex global environmental problems, such as water scarcity and contamination. Therefore, I designed an assessment to examine the ability of students to apply knowledge of aquatic chemistry to a new situation. Students used techniques learned to measure water chemistry and knowledge of the relationships between these variables and factors that may influence them to determine the source of unknown water samples (river, aquarium, purified, and spring water). I used student responses to 1) determine if students were able to identify unknowns, and 2) determine which evidence students use to justify relationships between variables and sources of water. My results indicated that students were best able to problem solve when they were introduced to the chemical and physical features of an ecosystem through hands-on exploration. Therefore all students correctly identified Red Cedar River water and used a greater number of keywords to describe their reasoning. When deciphering between purified and spring water, students used fewer keywords than used to determine river water, and were more likely to identify the water source incorrectly. An ecosystem that students were most unfamiliar with, the aquarium, elicited the greatest number of students determining the source through process of elimination. These data provide evidence that using Bloom’s taxonomy linearly, starting at lower levels such as comprehension and working up to higher levels such as synthesis, can be important when exploring difficult ecological concepts. Furthermore, this data suggests that repetition in using scientific techniques and problem solving will produce a greater number of students able to synthesize complex information to solve a new problem. |
