ABSTRACT
We used a design-based research approach to develop “data-rich problem”
(DRP) tasks intended to support middle and high school students in
constructing knowledge about food webs and ecosystem dynamics, specifically
the effects of species loss. The marine environment is used for context to
promote an understanding of interdependent ecological relationships and the
nonlinear and sustaining effects of loss of species. The Food Web DRP tasks
we describe are designed for classroom implementation in alignment with
the Next Generation Science Standards. The intended time frame for
implementation is five days (assuming 50-minute class periods).
Key Words: Ecosystems; food web; nonlinear relationships; systemic relationships;
Next Generation Science Standards; data-rich problem tasks.
Introduction
Student understandings of any topic should
seemingly tend to increase as a student pro-gresses through school; however, student
understanding of ecological relationships
and the functioning of ecosystems doesn’t
appear to meet this expectation. Studies have
revealed a pattern in student understanding,
beginning before high school (Hogan, 2000;
Grotzer & Basca, 2003) and extending
through high school (Griffiths & Grant,
1985; Webb & Boltt, 1990; Barman et al.,
1995) and into college (Webb & Boltt,
1990; White, 2000), in which students con-
tinue to view the complex relationships
within food webs as linear instead of cyclical or systemic. As a result,
students are not fully equipped to be responsible citizens in their local
communities, where the effects of human disturbance and loss of
species are occurring. To fully grasp the depth of how an ecosystem
is affected by various interactions (e.g., human disturbance, natural
disaster, fire), students must understand the complexity of the rela-
tionships within an ecosystem’s food web and “recognize all possible
pathways through which the effect of a change in one population
is transmitted to a second population” (Griffiths & Grant, 1985,
p. 434). In other words, we need to help students view food webs
as dynamic systems instead of seeing species interactions only as
direct cause-and-effect relationships.
Here, we introduce a set of “data-rich problem” (DRP) tasks
that use the marine environment as context to help middle and
high school students understand interdependent ecological relationships and the nonlinear and sustaining effects of species loss.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States,
2013) state that students must be able to “construct arguments supported by empirical evidence, construct explanations that predict patterns, and support and
revise explanations based on evidence” (NGSS
Standard MS-LS2-4, MS-LS2-2, and HS-LS2-2).
When two classes of seventh-graders engaged
with these tasks, we found that most students
began to “recognize patterns in data and make
warranted inferences about changes in populations, and evaluate empirical evidence supporting
arguments about changes to ecosystems” (NGSS
Standard MS-LS2-4).
A Design-Based Approach to
Concept Refinement of Causal
Relationship in Food Webs
According to studies in the learning sciences, a successfully
designed teaching intervention should include the student as
an active participant in the learning process. The three steps of
the “Learning-for-Use” framework (motivate, construct, and
As a result, students
are not fully equipped
to be responsible
citizens in their local
communities, where
the effects of human
disturbance and loss
of species are
occurring.
The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 78, No 8, pages. 635–641, ISSN 0002-7685, electronic ISSN 1938-4211. © 2016 National Association of Biology Teachers. All rights
reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/abt.2016.78.8.635.
THE AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER FOOD WEBS
FEATURE ARTICLE Understanding Causal
Relationships in Food Webs Using
“Data-Rich Problem” Tasks
• MARIN E. SILVA, APRIL C. MASKIEWICZ
