This activity is an inquiry based field investigation where students measure and map a small stream and then develop an understanding of the formation of a variety of small stream features.

This activity is a teacher-guided inquiry activity of the sorting or grouping of Minnesota critters according to student driven criteria or purpose of their groupings. Teacher/student questions and discussion should be encouraged after this activity to emphasize that awareness of the criteria or purpose of certain groupings may be important before beginning an investigation.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants -- prepared to work productively with students -- have been used to facilitate ungraded, voluntary oral assessments offered prior to exams. Oral assessments last one hour, and are offered prior to the three course exams. Orals are geared to improve student understanding and allow instructors to work with students on an individual basis to address misunderstandings. Students attend oral assessments in groups of 5-6 and work at a board to answer scripted, conceptual questions. The facilitator asks the initial scripted questions as well as follow-up probing questions and encourages students to work together.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants can be used to supplement the instructor and/or Teaching Assistant during recitations. They may help facilitate productive group work on tutorial activities designed to help students develop conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. In this example, we describe the use of Learning Assistants to support tutorials within recitation in two introductory science courses physics and chemistry.

Learning Assistants are used to facilitate student discussion in peer instruction during clicker questions (i.e., classroom response systems), by asking Socratic questions, emphasizing reasoning, and probing student thinking.

Using quadrats along line transects in two different habitats, students will gather data which will provide evidence that shows the interrelationships between vegetation types and small mammal populations

This activity is a computer lab activity in which students use Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet capable of calculating gravity forces and acceleration values for any two objects if the masses of the objects and their separation distance are entered. Students will use their calculators to analyze numerous object pairs and make conclusions about gravity forces and accelerations on earth, on other planets, and in space.

A variation of the think-pair-share technique is used to reinforce understanding of the income and substitution effects associated with a price change.

This is a guided inquiry investigation where students record and gather visual information of what the moon phases look like.

This activity demonstrates geo-demographic consumer segment lifestyle consumption patterns. The information available on the site is relevant to segmentation and targeting strategies used by marketers.

This activity provides a complete curriculum for teaching the photoelectric effect using the PhET Photoelectric Effect simulation in a large-lecture modern physics course. It includes links to powerpoint slides for two to three 50-minute lectures using Peer Instruction with clickers, and one homework assignment suitable for an online homework system. Research has demonstrated that students in classes using this curriculum have a better understanding of the photoelectric effect than students in classes using traditional instruction supplemented by a computerized tutor.

Labs and tutorials that use equipment such as circuits can be modified to use PhET simulations instead. Research shows that substituting the PhET Circuit Construction Kit simulation for real equipment in a variety of contexts leads to improved conceptual learning in the best cases, and the same conceptual learning in the worst cases. There are many advantages to using PhET simulations over real equipment: They are easy to use, so students can play around and modify the experiment quickly and easily without fear of breaking the equipment. They have productive constraints to focus attention on the most important aspects of the experiment (e.g. bulb brightness and current flow) rather than on irrelevant aspects (e.g. wire color and length). Finally, if real equipment is not available, PhET simulations provide the opportunity to do multiple experiments with a single piece of equipment: a computer.

These labs provide examples of using very open-ended questions to guide students in exploring a simulation and designing their own experiments. These labs can lead to a high level of quantitative thinking about data analysis.

This activity is a field investigation in which students conduct a plant survey of two study plots, analyze their findings through graphing and mathematic models, investigate the impact of human activity in the general area (optional) and generate questions for further investigation of the study plots.

An inquiry activity for students to test physical properties of several compounds to analyze data and determine if the compound is ionic or covalent. This is ideal for an introduction to ionic and molecular compound nomenclature.

This activity is for an introductory oceanography course. It is designed to allow students to use various tools (satellite images, Google Earth) to explore the shape of the sea floor and ocean basins in order to gain a better understanding of both the processes that form ocean basins, as well as how the shape of ocean basins influences physical and biological processes.

This activity is a field investigation where students will compare the biodiversity of two separate habitats based on the collection and identification of insects.

In this individual research project, a senior thesis student conducts a regression analysis that explores whether high school GPA or standardized test scores are better predictors of the cumulative GPAs of college graduates at her own university. The data are easily obtainable from the Office of Institutional Research. The project can be modified to be a group research project in a Research Methods Class or a Special Topics Upper Level Economics class.

Students use detailed bathymetric maps to find submarine landslides and compare the slope of these slides to the slope of hills near school and home. By comparing the slopes they can consider slope failure, especially during earthquakes.