OVERVIEW

This portion of the web site contains a number of different teaching resources which are the result of a National Science Foundation grant awarded for the development of a field based environmental curriculum. These resources consist of exercise modules (containing complete handouts), data collection sheets (formatted sheets with legends and examples), and equipment lists (plans for equipment construction and commercial products). The data collection sheets have been created as a specific response to the needs of the teaching modules as are the various pieces of equipment. Many of the data collection sheets and equipment are included or mentioned in the teaching modules. For those more experienced the data collection sheets and equipment lists may provide a simple fast solution to a known problem. In addition to the teaching modules themselves, we have included a few guidelines to help aid in the development of new exercises. Please note that while all of these exercises have been developed for a specific geographic setting, they can be easily modified to suite a wide variety of settings. This is also true for the level of the exercises. Many can be modified to work from the high school level down to the primary school level with simple modifications.

We request that if you use the various items available via this web site that you acknowledge the National Science Foundation and the Judson Mead Geologic Field Station of Indiana University as the source of the materials. We always welcome comments and are willing to work with individuals with needs to help create new versions and also to provide greater details or other file formats as might be necessary.

BACKGROUND

In the summer of 1996 the Judson Mead Geologic Field Station began an initiative to integrate environmental concepts and techniques into the standard field curriculum being offered in G429e. At this same time, a new course was also developed that was designed as an integrated field based environmental science course (G329). The underlying philosophy for all of the exercises developed for these two courses was one of integration and incorporation of both simple field observations with advanced instrumentation and quantitative analysis. The resulting courses contain numerous individual exercises/modules which can be implemented in any physical setting. The exercises emphasize a problem solving framework with initial steps involving problem identification and the development of a scientific approach followed by data collection, data reduction and manipulation, and data interpretation with a final step linking back to the original problem and a ability to answer the questions at the heart of the problem. 

Both the G329 and G429e curriculum utilize data from the Willow Creek Demonstration Watershed, an instrumented watershed, but this can be replaced with a wide variety of data available from many local and national governmental agencies, universities, and other private sources.