Field Investigations

Overview

Full Guide

Link to PDF of complete guide

Field investigations help students become informed citizen scientists and engineers. Descriptive Field Investigations involve describing and/or quantifying parts of natural system, while Comparative Field Investigations involve collecting data on different populations/organisms or under different conditions to make a comparison. 

Field investigations often take place when it is difficult to manipulate variables and maintain "control" and "experimental" groups. Instead scientists look for descriptive, comparative, or correlative trends in the study area. This section only focuses on two types of field investigations that can easily take place in classroom or other learning settings.