Identifying Deep Sea Gastropods in an Authentic Student-Scientist-Partnership - Learning To Deal With Identification

Abstract

Contrary to the relevance of the species concept in biology, the identification of species is scarcely done in school biology. Research literature dealing with identification of species by students is available, but not to an extent one could expect. In this explorative study a marine biologist worked together with 10th graders in school and identified deep sea snails (most of them were limpets) collected on a scientific field trip. This study focuses on the first 100 minutes when the students started to identify the snails initially with the scientist. The process was documented by the approach of field research as an explorative study with a participating observation. Research focused on the questions of the challenges for students in identifying the snails and how teachers and scientists deal with those challenges