Movements of House Sparrows Captured at an Experimental Grain Station in Fargo, North Dakota

From 2 August through 1 October 1993 we banded and leg flagged 362 house sparrows (126 adults, 236 juveniles) captured in a decoy trap at an experimental grain station on the campus of North Dakota State University, Fargo (NDSU). We documented sightings of leg-flagged birds between 3 August 1993 and 14 December 1994. Over this period, 56 (66%) of the total 76 observations of leg-flagged birds were on the NDSU campus; 21 (28%) of the 76 observations occurred between March and December 1994, a minimum of 5 months after the leg flags were attached and following the 1993-1994 winter. Of the 21 observations in 1994, 16 (76%) occurred on campus. The farthest sighting of a leg-flagged bird was 6.5 km (4 mi.) from the trap site. The data indicated that we captured and marked a localized population. A concerted effort based on trapping could reduce house sparrow damage on the small, experimental plots of cereal grains and sunflower grown at the station

Patterns of content representation.

This study was conducted to track content as representations in the experienced curriculum of a secondary environmental science class. The qualitative analyses involved both the identification and the tracking of pieces of content within and across curriculum occasions. Curriculum and instructional features were found to exist as patterns as content was represented in curriculum occasions. The patterns included an evolution from one or few representations to multiple representations. This evolution was commonly facilitated by the teacher during discourse episodes in which students' comments and questions were utilized in order to introduce alternative or different representations of pieces of content. Patterns also existed in the ways in which the teacher's knowledge of the students, the content, and the curriculum were related to representations of content. The findings suggest that content, embedded in the curriculum occasions in which it is represented, can be studied in an ecologically valid manner. Also, the close association found to exist between teacher knowledge and content representation suggests that arbitrary separations of the two in classroom inquiries may be inappropriate

Students' Studying and Approaches to Learning in Introductory Biology

This exploratory study was conducted in an introductory biology course to determine 1) how students used the large lecture environment to create their own learning tasks during studying and 2) whether meaningful learning resulted from the students' efforts. Academic task research from the K–12 education literature and student approaches to learning research from the postsecondary education literature provided the theoretical framework for the mixed methods study. The subject topic was cell division. Findings showed that students 1) valued lectures to develop what they believed to be their own understanding of the topic; 2) deliberately created and engaged in learning tasks for themselves only in preparation for the unit exam; 3) used course resources, cognitive operations, and study strategies that were compatible with surface and strategic, rather than deep, approaches to learning; 4) successfully demonstrated competence in answering familiar test questions aligned with their surface and strategic approaches to studying and learning; and 5) demonstrated limited meaningful understanding of the significance of cell division processes. Implications for introductory biology education are discussed

Responding to the Call for Change: The New College of Science Teacher Preparation Program at the University of Arizona

The reports of several national commissions, like the Nationa