GENERAL EDUCATION COMMON ASSIGNMENT TEMPLATE

Note: This is the assignment that all professors teaching a section in the San Jacinto College Core Curriculum during fall 2014 will agree upon, teach, assign, assess and document in Blackboard. Submit one assignment per course to the Office of Vice Chancellor for Learning and Assessment.Due no later than February 7.

  1. TITLE & NUMBER OF THE COURSE:

BIOL 1413: General Zoology

  1. TITLE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

Scientific Method Exercise

  1. GENERAL EDUCATION CORE OBJECTIVES TO BE ASSESSED WITH THIS ASSIGNMENT (List specific general education outcomes and any student learning outcomes):

Teamwork, Empirical and Quantitative Skills, Critical Thinking Skills, Communication Skills

  1. DESCRIPTION OF ASSIGNMENT (as it would appear in your syllabus or class handouts)

This exercise is meant to test one or more of the following general education outcomes: communication skills, critical thinking skills, empirical and quantitative skills, and teamwork.

The assignment is to act as scientists and participate in perhaps the most interesting aspect of a zoologist’s life: finding answers to what you feel are interesting questions about animals!

Students and/or teams will come up with an interesting/unusual/unique observation of an animal/s of their choosing. This is the first part of the 4 part process of answering scientific questions, known as the scientific method. As discussed in class, the 4 parts are observation, hypothesis, experimentation/testing, and conclusions.

Once the observation has been made/decided upon, you will develop a hypothesis based on that observation.You will then develop an experiment in order to test the hypothesis, and then discuss the results of the experiment (including data) in order to satisfy the general education outcome/s being measured.

Each student will then turn in this assignment (via Blackboard), which will be complete with 4 separate sections: 1)observation section, 2) hypothesis section, 3) experimentation/testing section, and 4) conclusions section. Finally, each student and/or team will present their scientific method exercise to the class.