Do and Learn

Seventeen-year-old Severin Gilbert lives just outside Ulm, Montana, population 750, and goes to a kindergarten through 12th grade school in the slightly larger town of Cascade. Because the school is so small—about 30 students per grade—most classes are offered only during one class period each year, and scheduling conflicts can often mean that science classes take a back seat to math, English, and other required courses. Severin, a senior this fall, hasn’t been able to fit in chemistry yet; she took biology though a correspondence course. Still, she thought she might want to be a bioengineer. “It sounded like sort of what I wanted to do,” she says. “But I hadn’t done much lab work. There were really simple things I didn’t know how to do.”

Cascade’s only full-time science teacher, Billie Perry, knew Severin was interested in science and suggested she apply for a summer research program for local students at the McLaughlin Research Institute , a mere 17 miles from her home. Severin’s lack of lab experience was not a concern. The staff at McLaughlin recognizes that rural schools can’t provide all the opportunities of a large urban or suburban school district, says George Carlson, HHMI’s program director at McLaughlin, the only research center within a three-hour drive. Severin is just the type of student they were trying to attract to the program: someone who is interested in science but might not get to work in a research lab otherwise.

Severin was selected for the program and, during the summer of 2010, she worked with a teacher from a Great Falls high school on a research project in a lab studying Parkinson’s disease. “It’s been incredible, Severin says. “I thought I would be doing a lot less interesting things. I thought it would be more of a ‘watch and learn’ situation rather than ‘do and learn.’” The experience cemented her desire to become a bioengineer—now that she knows what one is.

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Having a research institution nearby is a rarity for most rural students, so sometimes a pond will have to do. For the last eight years, teachers and students from five high schools in four North Carolina counties have used a historic mill pond in Chowan County as a place to do hands-on research. The idea came from Colleen Karl, the northeastern outreach coordinator for The Science House, a North Carolina State University outreach program for teachers and students that is funded in part by HHMI. She stumbled across Bennett’s Mill pond one day and thought it would be the perfect place to teach students the frustrations and rewards of real research.

Farmers brought corn to the mill pond for grinding for hundreds of years. Today, the mill is gone, but Karl and the teachers take students onto the 100-acre pond in canoes and help them decide what would make a good research topic. The young researchers then spend the next two years at this local site collecting and analyzing their data, with the help of their teachers as well as state biologists and extension workers. “It is an experience they can’t get in a regular classroom,” Karl says. “The biggest value to the students is that they are empowered when they work on a project like this. They have total ownership of it.”

Student Joel Moreland spent his childhood fishing on the mill pond, Karl says. He wondered whether a drought in 2007 had harmed the black crappie population, so he designed an experiment with local fish and wildlife scientists to determine the age of the remaining black crappies by looking at their length, weight, and a bone in the fish’s heads. Joel, currently a senior, is still collecting data, but so far the fish that would have been born in 2007 are missing from the lineup. “This is Joel’s learning laboratory,” Karl says. “He’s really excited about this work and knows what he’s doing is making a difference.” Of the 74 students who have participated in the project, 86 percent are attending a four-year college and 70 percent are majoring in science.

Research centered on local resources is a model that is applicable anywhere, says Karl. “Not every county has a mill pond, but they have other resources. Projects like this work really well in our rural communities,” she adds. “We do have great resources. We just need to learn how to use them.”

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