Rice, Bellaire students each benefit from animal behavior seminar

Rice, Bellaire students each benefit from animal behavior seminar

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

Rice undergraduates enrolled in this fall’s Biosciences 321 course, Animal Behavior, organized, planned and taught a daylong seminar in November for more than 80 students from Bellaire High School’s Advanced Placement Biology II class. The seminar gave the Bellaire students a glimpse of the college experience along with an introduction to evolutionary theory and concepts surrounding animal behavior.

COURTESY PHOTO

Rice undergraduates planned and taught a one-day seminar last month for 80 Bellaire High School AP biology students.

“The undergraduates who planned and taught the seminar got to see exactly what’s involved in preparing a lecture and in studying a topic thoroughly enough to explain it to others, ” said course instructor Joan Strassmann, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “Based on the evaluations of both the Rice and Bellaire students, this was a great learning experience for everyone.”

The undergraduates structured the seminar around five working groups. Bellaire students rotated every 30 minutes between workshops on evolutionary theory, hypothesis testing, sexual selection and mating systems, kin selection and within-family conflict, and game theory and communication. Each half-hour workshop had an active learning component.

The 28 students in BIOS 321 handled everything from setting up the technology in the classrooms and planning the lectures to printing up flyers and buying the day’s food. The structure of each workshop varied, based upon the approach chosen by the student instructors.

For example, the hypothesis-testing group filmed and produced their own video at the Houston Zoo. In the workshop, the instructors encouraged the Bellaire students to devise hypotheses for things they’d observed in the video, like sentinel behavior by meerkats or the playing of orangutans. The session closed with the high school students observing and watching and developing hypotheses for the behavior of four live ferrets.

The evolution group used a series of short videos and matching cards to engage the students in a discussion about behavioral adaptations. The kin selection group handed out cards listing costs and benefits and had the students role-play, deciding whether or not they would behave in a particular way. The results indicated humans are more complicated than many animals and show altruism to nonrelatives even at considerable cost to themselves.

The game theory group also used cards and role-playing to engage the Bellaire students. Each got a card designating them as a hawk or a dove with certain resource values. Each student interacted with others in the class, taking or losing resources. The instructors showed that the final population balance contained both hawks and doves, which was predicted in advance from the resource values.

A highlight of the day was the class-participation exercise developed by the sexual selection group. Taking a page from peacocks and other animals that develop elaborate displays to attract a mate, each boy in the class was asked to develop his own dance and perform it for the girls. The girls rated the displays and the winner got a box of chocolates as a prize.

Afterward the students gathered together, filled out evaluations, ate a little more and played with a Frisbee. It was a great opportunity for Rice students to teach and for Bellaire High School students to get a taste of Rice.

“The information was presented in such a fun and casual way,” one Bellaire student said in their evaluation. “It was super fun to be taught by students with a passion for their studies, too.”