Charlene **************************************
Charlene D'Avanzo Professor of Ecology & Director, Center for Learning Hampshire College Homepage: http://helios.hampshire.edu/~cdNS/ TIEE: http://tiee.ecoed.net/ ************************************
Before educators use activities to help students understand trophic
efficiency or pyramids, it is important that they recognize the
common misconceptions children have about these topics. Otherwise, an
activity can end up reinforcing these naive conceptions. Tina Grotzer
from the Harvard Graduate School of Education has done some really
interesting work to try to expose students' misunderstandings about
ecosystem dynamics. Tina spoke in a Symposium titled "Why is Ecology
Hard to Learn" at the 2008 ESA meeting (
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/0012-9623(2008)89%5B462%3ASWIEHT%5D2.0.CO%3B2).
For example, students may reverse arrows on food webs they draw
because they focus on "who eats what" and therefore can miss the idea
of energy flow entirely. Also, when working with index cards on food
webs and asked what would happen if all the plants disappeared, many
children in Tina's study thought that only the herbivores would be
affected. Thus they did not recognize indirect effects, so important
in food webs.
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