Middle School Inquiry Lab on Short- and Long-Term Environmental Impacts
In this lab, using the data collected by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), students will analyze the short- and long-term environmental impacts of Hurricane Harvey and predict population response.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How did the flooding during Hurricane Harvey impact the environment and surrounding wildlife?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- computer or tablet
- colored pencils
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students will conduct research on the affect that Hurricane Harvey had in and around the Houston area. This is a great way to connect the curriculum with a major event that happened very recently. Using the link provided with the lab, students will follow very direct and detailed instructions as they learn how a hurricane can cause short- and long-term impacts on the environment.
Students will look up topics like water, air, health, and safety, and analyze what the affects were and how each impacted the people and the organisms in that ecosystem. Once students have completed their research portion of the lab, students are presented with two scenarios. The first scenario is to predict how an endangered species will respond to the changes caused by Harvey. The second scenario deals with the immediate population effect on a common mammal. Both scenarios get students thinking beyond their own world and how the world around them deals with events like these too.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Is Hurricane Harvey considered a short- or long-term event? Justify your answer.
- If an organism was able to survive the increase in airborne toxins, what traits will their offspring carry? What about the next generation?
- Genetic diversity is important to maintaining healthy populations. If most of the Attwater's prairie chickens in the Houston area died during the storm, how will their future generations be affected?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 8.11B – Explore how short- and long-term environmental changes affect organisms and traits in subsequent populations.
