Konza Environmental Education Program's Schoolyard LTER: Teaching Science Through Ecology

Poster Number: 
366
Presenter/Primary Author: 
Jill Haukos
Co-Authors: 
Annie Baker

Konza Prairie Biological Station established its education program in 1996 for visitors and students interested in learning about the tallgrass prairie. With the Schoolyard LTER supplements (1998), programs for school children were developed to parallel the long-term ecological research on site and also to add information useful to scientists. Teachers participate in annual professional development workshops to learn about the prairie ecosystem, experience the protocols of several long-term scientific activities and choose one or more of these activities to add to their curriculum. They also learn how to enter their data into our on-line databases and manipulate the data in spreadsheets for use in graphing and statistical reports by their students. Additional user-friendly databases have been prepared from site metadata for comparison with student data and as additional data sets for use in the classroom. The teachers are required to bring students to Konza Prairie each year for a real-world “process of science” experience. The activities include a grasshopper inventory, plant biomass collection, effect of fire on the plant community, stream macro-invertebrates, stream geomorphology, the fire reversal study and others. Community volunteers trained as docents, help with the activities at a ratio of one docent to four students. In the 10 years since 1999 an average of 2000 students per year have visited Konza Prairie. About half participate in at least one SLTER science activity. An expansion of this program, called Prairies Across Kansas (PAK), began with NSF/LTER supplemental funding and an EdEn grant (2005) and has given the opportunity to teachers and their students around the state to participate by collecting data at a native prairie near their school, entering the data into our databases and comparing that data with other classrooms in the basic three prairie types of Kansas (tall, mixed and short grass prairies).