Topic: Teaching Process Skills
Peard ( 1994 ).  Using Golden Rod Galls to Teach Science Process Skills. The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 56, no. 1, 47-50.

Summary: This is an article from 1994 in the “How-to-do-it” series of “The American Biology Teacher”. The focus of the paper is to give explicit instructions to biology teachers in how to use Golden Rod Galls to teach the three fundamental categories of basic science process skills: 1) activities such as observation, questioning, graphing, data interpretation, prediction and drawing conclusions, 2) more complex processing like development of hypotheses, experimental design, and operational conceptualization, and 3) technical skills. The use of the golden rod is because of its cosmopolitan distribution, ease of collection and practicality for lab activities. Apparently, several types of galls occur commonly on golden rod but the author is good at establishing that just one type is of use in this project, and in indicating how to tell which to use. There follows a concise but very thorough discussion of the biology of the parasitic fly that is responsible for the gall formation, and the biological consequences to the golden rod host. This information is, of course, instrumental for the understanding on the part of the instructor as to the relevance of this ecology to teaching basic process skills. After this factual introduction there is a section devoted to explaining how the system can best be used in the classroom. In this section the author systematically provides a series of questions which might be posed to the student to help guide them through the discovery process while simultaneously helping in the development of the science process skill. These suggestions are presented in the same order as the categorical hierarchy mentioned earlier, starting with basic observational activities and progressing through data collection, prediction, and alternative experimental design and testing skills. The paper closes with even more suggestions of much higher level activities appropriate to the specific student population, such as more sophisticated statistical analyses (t-tests, Chi-square etc.).

Reaction: I like that the author states in the introduction his belief that using naturally occurring opportunities from students’ environments should work much better to develop process skills than “devising artificial ways”. The rather detailed discussion of the biology of the system would be very helpful for the instructor in the preparatory stages. The activities are well order and specific enough to use as is, but open-ended enough to allow for expansion and imaginative manipulation. This seems to be a rather easy exercise for the instructor to plan and perform as well as providing many opportunities for exploration ad concept development on the part of the students. I think given the appropriate conditions this would be an extremely effective activity for teaching process skills. This project could be formulated for just about any group of students from, I’d say, middle school thorough introductory college courses.