Oyster Research Tank Investigation

Students build engagement about setting up the oyster tanks that they will monitor through observing, measuring, and asking questions about oysters.

Students work together to create brackish water with an appropriate salinity for their classroom tanks.

Students learn about the nitrogen cycle in the oyster tank and go through the engineering design cycle to create a biological filter.

Students learn water chemistry testing protocols and use them to cycle their classroom tank.

Students sort questions from the class question pool into categories based on how they can best be answered.

Students make predictions about salinity in their class tanks while thinking about change over time. They practice creating simple graphs from a dataset, and making inferences and telling stories from graphs.

Students research the questions from their class Question Pool that they determined can be best answered by consulting experts.

Students design an experimental setup for their second oyster research tank that can help them research a question from the class question pool.

Students consider questions that could be answered with oyster data and then go through the data analysis process with a published dataset.

Students choose a question of interest to investigate further using one of the research methods they've been introduced to.