Dave Stone, University Laboratory High School, Urbana, IL.

CTER Program Final Project, Summer, 1998.

Lesson #4 - Economic Impact of a Selected Orthopteran (1 day activity)

Assumed Background:

Prior to this activity, all students will have learned about 1) general structure of insects through classroom discussion of insect structure, 2) individual examination of grasshopper structure and function (Lubber grasshopper dissection), 3) discussion of the order Orthoptera, 4) discussion of taxonomic differences between Orthoptera families and 4) reading regarding locust swarming and phase transformation from Life On a Little Known Planet (Evans).

Objectives:

  • Students will develop skills in searching of online scientific journals.
  • Students will further their knowledge of localized geographic impact of an orthopteran species of their choice.
  • Students will summarize main points of a journal article and present their findings in written form.

    • Materials:

    Time:

    Assignment:

    Economic Impact of a Selected Orthopteran

    This activity will introduce you to electronic journal articles, actual scientific articles accessible to anyone with a computer, Internet connection and web browsing software. You may approach this assignment in either of two ways. First, you may elect to use the Internet search engine of your choice to search online articles dealing with a particular genus of interest (genera information is provided in your spiralbound field guide), or you may want to use other key words such as "locust" in your searching. Be aware that you get a large number of "hits", though the vast majority of the links you will encounter will likely not come from scientific journals. Should you believe that the article you would like to summarize comes from an actual online journal, be certain to have me "ok" your reference as a legitimate journal. The second option is to go directly to a known online electronic journal (e.g. American Entomologist, Ecological Entomology, Environmental Entomology or the Journal of Applied Entomology) to examine its Table of Contents for articles of interest. Regardless of your choice, spend the majority of the class period browsing web-based articles directly addressing economic impact of your selected orthopteran. Bookmark articles as you encounter them. Print a copy of the web-based article you select. When writing up the assignment, be certain to list the article name, URL, list the author(s) and list the author affiliation. Summarize the information in the article. If there are links to other web pages, be certain to include a brief summary of the number and quality of those links to other sites from the page that you have selected. Your review should be approximately one full page in length. This assignment carries a single lab weighting (1/3 exam).

    Extension Activity - Students who would like to further pursue this introduction to online scientific journal articles are encouraged to examine the online Journal of Economic Entomology Table of Contents. You may then select an article of interest (NOT restricted to orthopterans), find and copy it at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Biology Library and summarize it as you did for the assignment above. Turning in this summary with the first assigned article will result in a combination grade being assigned, with the two articles have a collective weighting of two lab write-ups (2/3 exam).

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    Last modified on July 26, 1998.