HANDHELD DEVICES USED FOR INQUIRY-BASED LAB IN EARTH SYSTEMS SCIENCE

Earth Systems Science is a required 100-level core course for Environmental Science majors at Ithaca College. One of the overarching goals of the course is to have students understand and describe key components and interactions that characterize the earth system. Another goal is to have students obtain the basic skills of gathering, organizing, and analyzing environmental data. The laboratory section of the course addresses both of these goals by having students measure various attributes of the air, soil, and water on the Ithaca College campus. The measurements were done using handheld data loggers that incorporate several plug-in probes.

Students were divided into pairs and each team was given a data logger, temperature probe, and pH probe. In addition, each team was given a “special” instrument that included probes for measuring total dissolved solids, water turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and soil moisture. Each week, the teams would gather data from three locations on campus that included two ponds and one stream. By the end of the semester, students had become confident in handling the instruments and had compiled a large set of data. In additions, the students had to address the need for data quality control and the limitations of some of the instruments. In this presentation, the exercise will be described in detail and specific examples of student work will be presented.