Teaching the Next Generation

By Richard E. Bonney, Jr.

Photo credit: Tim Gallagher

Young citizen scientists at an elementary school watch birds and observe their behavior as part of their Classroom FeederWatch curriculum.

Education permeates everything we do at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Every one of our programs, from Bird Population Studies to Evolutionary Biology, strives not only to conduct groundbreaking research, but also to inform, stimulate, and even directly engage the public. You’d have to look long and hard to find a group as dedicated to education as the Lab’s scientific staff, whose members continually find time to write articles for our magazine and newsletter, to give lectures both in and out of classrooms, to appear on radio and television shows, to help lead hands-on workshops, and to prepare huge numbers of pages for the Lab’s vast site on the World Wide Web.

But the Lab’s dedication to teaching goes even further. Indeed, over the past two decades we have developed an entire program devoted to public education, which offers information, resources, and projects for citizens of all ages, backgrounds, and ornithological abilities.

One of our most visible educational products is in your hands. The current incarnation of Living Bird was launched in 1982 as a means of informing the public about the most recent findings in bird watching, ornithological research, and bird conservation. Although Living Bird actually debuted in 1962, for its first 20 years it was published as an annual technical journal containing mostly original research. The current magazine, which has won numerous awards for its content and design, still includes many articles written by scientists, but they are presented in a non-technical manner.

Another major Lab publication is BirdScope, the Lab’s newsletter. Unlike Living Bird, which usually presents bird information from scientists and bird organizations around the world, BirdScope focuses on the Lab’s own projects, programs, and people. BirdScope debuted in the summer of 1987 with a lead article on pigeon navigation and homing written by then director Charles Walcott.

Photo credit: Irby Lovette

Hands-on workshops are among the many Lab offerings. Above, a workshop leader helps participants identify an Empidonax flycatcher.

For people who wish to read even more—hundreds of pages more—the Lab offers a Home Study Course in Bird Biology designed to provide comprehensive information on birds and their environments in a manner accessible to nonscientists and teachers around the world. The current edition, released in 2001, was several years in the making and consists of 10 chapters written by experts in each of several fields such as bird behavior, ecology, and conservation. The course was originally released in 1972, and between then and 1998—when it was taken out of print in anticipation of the new edition—more than 10,000 students received graduation certificates. The newest version, on the street for less than two years, already has enrolled more than 2,100 students, many of whom are extremely pleased with the product. One student, a special education teacher from Florida, recently wrote “This course has kept me in a continuous state of amazement at the complexities and competencies of birds. And I appreciate the tone of the writing—while remaining objective in the presentation of facts and theories, each author shows true respect and love for not only birds but all of life, and has maintained a sense of awe and wonder about the subject of his or her life’s work.”

The Lab’s Education program is also heavily involved in our Citizen Science program, described in more detail on page 14. In fact, much of the funding that has supported the development and testing of our innovative citizen-science projects—designed to engage the public in professional research—has been generously granted from the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Education and Human Resources. While this initially might seem odd, considering that the projects are consistently contributing to scientific knowledge, participants are also learning a great deal about birds, ecology, observation, and the scientific process as a result of their endeavors. Quotes such as this one from a participant in Project FeederWatch are common: “I have always enjoyed birds, but Project FeederWatch ‘forced’ me to sit down and actually watch them. After awhile, I began to notice patterns and behaviors in some birds that prompted me to take a closer look. It’s then that I realized I was seeing birds that I thought never visited my feeders!”

Indeed, we receive letters like this from participants in all our projects—The Birdhouse Network, Urban Bird Studies, the House Finch Disease Survey, Birds in Forested Landscapes, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and many more. One of the functions of the Lab’s Education program is to study and document the social and educational impacts of citizen-science participation. Letters from participants are a start, but we also administer surveys and visit sites such as science museums, Audubon chapters, and youth organizations that are implementing our projects as part of their educational activities.

The Lab’s Education program also has embraced the World Wide Web as a teaching tool. All of the Lab’s citizen-science projects are now online, and most have developed interactive web sites where participants can submit, retrieve, and explore data. A good example is eBird, for which participants can now submit sightings of any birds they see, anyplace, anytime. Lab educators are heavily involved in designing these sites, conducting “usability studies” to ensure that they are easy to use and navigate. In addition, the Education program builds information sites, such as our soon-to-be launched “All About Birds” site, with detailed accounts of more than 200 North American species as well as information about birds and bird watching in general. We hope that over the next few years, All About Birds will become the place to go for virtually any ornithological information.

The Education program also designs curricula for use in elementary and middle schools, an endeavor that offers our greatest reward but also our biggest challenge. To understand why, consider briefly the National Science Education Standards, an excellent set of guidelines published in 1996 by the National Research Council. In a nutshell, the Standards state that science is best taught and learned when students engage in extended inquiry and research. “Students should experience science that engages them in actively constructing ideas and explanations and that enhances their abilities to do science,” the Standards assert. Teachers must “encourage and model the skills of scientific inquiry, as well as the curiosity, openness to new ideas and data, and skepticisms that characterize science.”

These ideas resonate beautifully with the concept of citizen science, whose projects provide unparalleled opportunities to facilitate authentic classroom research. And indeed our first curriculum, Classroom FeederWatch, is designed to help teachers lead their students through the entire research process, from learning to identify birds, to putting up feeders, to counting and studying feeder birds, to conducting original bird research in schoolyards or local neighborhoods. Many research articles written by Classroom FeederWatch students, based on ideas they thought up on their own, are published each year in our student journal, Classroom Birdscope.

Both students and teachers love this program. One third-grade teacher from New Jersey told us “Classroom FeederWatch takes learning beyond the walls of the school. It creates excitement and enthusiasm in children. After nighttime parent meetings at our school to explain the program, parents pick up the excitement of their children and begin to learn bird biology, identification, and behavior. Observing and studying birds becomes a family hobby.” A sixth-grade teacher from New York wrote “I was drawn to the data analysis and research aspect. Students gather their own data; they’re not just reading results out of a book. It’s authentic research that children can handle.” And an eighth-grade teacher from Utah wrote “Cornell leads the way in this exciting form of science education. If possible, I would base my entire curriculum on developing partnerships between my students and professional scientists conducting authentic research.”

And therein lies the challenge. In these days of high-stakes testing, where students are primarily required to memorize facts for standardized tests, finding classroom time to engender the kind of powerful learning espoused by the National Research Council is difficult. And yet, witnessing the power of our projects to develop student interest in ecology and nature, we are committed to persevere, both hoping that the educational pendulum will once again swing in the direction of inquiry education and also helping to lead the charge by demonstrating the impact of our projects. Toward that end, we have just received a new grant from the National Science Foundation’s instructional materials development program to build a bigger and stronger curriculum based on eBird, so that teachers will be able to conduct bird studies in virtually any location.

The Lab’s public programs represent the best in meaningful, hands-on research, allowing people of all ages and from all walks of life to become directly involved with the process of science. And they have the satisfaction of knowing that the data they gather will ultimately be used to design effective conservation strategies in the years ahead.