Lesson: Schoolyard Pitfall Trap Experiment

National Science Standards Addressed:

Content Standard A: As a result of activities in grades K-12, all students should develop

Content Standard C: As a result of activities, all students should develop understanding of:

Program Standard D: The K-12 science program must give students access to appropriate and sufficient resources, including quality teachers, time, materials, and equipment, adequate and safe space, and the community.

 

Grade Levels: 4-12 (Note: This experiment can be simplified or made more challenging depending on the developmental levels of your students. See Teacher Information.)

Description:

Babyfood jar pitfall traps containing different baits are placed in different areas of the schoolyard over a twenty-four hour period of time. Students count and identify the different animals caught in their pitfall traps and then post their data for others to analyze and compare.

Approximate Time Involved: One or two 30-minute classroom planning sessions, 30 minutes to set out traps, 30 minutes to identify and count animals, 20 minutes to enter data online, one or two 30-minute classroom sessions to examine results, state conclusions, draw inferences, and make recommendations. NOTE: Traps should be set out for 24-hour periods.

Teacher Information:

Schoolyards, wetlands, fields, woodlands, and other outdoor areas are homes for a host of small animals--insects, spiders, centipedes, etc.--that you rarely see. A pitfall trap can be used to capture these small creatures so you can examine their numbers and varieties. You can also test your pitfall trap to see if bait makes it more effective, and to compare the effectiveness of different baits.

Challenging Your Students to Be Problem Solvers:

To make this experiment more challenging to your students, you might just want to pose a question such as: What types of food will attract the most organisms to a baby food jar pitfall trap? What location in the schoolyard will produce the most organisms in a baby food jar pitfall trap? Design and conduct an experiment to measure the number and types of macro-invertebrates living at ground level in the schoolyard.

This should become a team exercise where your student groups might each develop and write a hypothesis, list the materials they would use (baby food jars should be used for the traps so that the online data can remain fairly consistent), the number of each item, and a procedure. An excellent way to assess this activity is to have the teams repeat each other's experiment to see if they achieve the same results. This will also replicate the real world challenges facing a research scientist.

Here is an opportunity for your students, especially those at late high school, to present and defend their pitfall trap results to a professional in the field:

Dr. Elaine AbuSharbain, Science Educator at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, has agreed to review any student designed experiments and their results, conclusions, inferences, and recommendations. Elaine's Email Address is: eabusha@siue.edu

Needed Materials:

 blunt tweezers, small paint brush, magnifying glass, animal identification charts or field guides (Golden Guides are inexpensive and fairly accurate identification books), felt-tip marker (indelible ink), 10 pieces of thick cardboard (20 cm x 20 cm) to cover trap, hand spade, several plastic containers with lids or resealable plastic bags, 10 empty large 180 ml (6 oz.) glass baby food jars ;3 grams (1/8 oz.) of one or more of the following baits: apple, meat, cheese, peanut butter, syrup; 40 small flat stones, rubber stoppers or blocks of wood approximately 1 cm. square, 10 slightly larger rocks to keep cardboard covers from blowing away. (NOTE: If you plan to run several different tests in different locations, you may need more than the suggested amount of materials.)

Safety Rule:

 You can avoid direct contact with the animals you have trapped by using tweezers and/or a paint brush to move them from the pitfall trap to a jar or resealable plastic bag.

Procedure :

Student Information: The following information will provide you with the steps for setting up your pitfall trap and collecting the trapped organisms. It is important to hold all of the variables constant except for those that are being manipulated. Constant (or controlled variables) would be such things as: the size of the baby food jar, the amount of time the experiment is conducted, the amount of food, the position of the jar in the ground, the cardboard covering, etc. Manipulated (or independent) variables would be those things that we change to see if the response will be different, such as: type of food, location of the jar, etc.) The responding (or dependent) variable for this experiment will be the number and variety of animals you catch in each of your jars. NOTE: Temperature is one variable that will difficult to control or intentionally manipulate in this experiment. However, from your experiments, you may be able to infer as to whether temperature has any impact on the number and variety of animals collected.

The reporting form for this experiment is set up so that you can determine how many traps you want to put out, where you want to place them, and what baits you want to use. NOTE: Be sure to include a control pitfall trap at each chosen site which will have no food in it. Also remember that a good scientific experiment is repeated a minimum of three times. Therefore, your data will be more accurate if you set up several pitfall traps that are exactly the same and then compile an average of your data before submitting it.

Steps to Setting up and Collecting from the Pitfall Trap

Below is a list of questions that can be used to stimulate student discussions. If your students are at a developmental level where you are able to challenge their higher level thinking skills, then only present them with the first set of questions from each group below. Use the second list of questions as a way to stimulate thinking when you students seem unable to expand their knowledge on their own.

Examining Local Results

Discussion Questions that Require More Critical Thinking Skills:

Discussion Questions that Require Less Critical Thinking Skills:

Examining Local and Online Results

Discussion Questions That Will Require Critical Thinking Skills to Compare Local Data to the Online Data of Others

General Discussion Questions that May Occur as a Result of Comparing Local Data to the Online Data of Others