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Research Opportunities for Students and Teachers
An important Monarchs in the Classroom goal is to promote research and inquiry-based learning. There many opportunities for you and your students to become involved in monarch reseach projects, and to share your results with the broader Monarchs in the Classroom community. Check them out!
The Monarchs in the Classroom Monarch Fair is based on a Science Fair model, with all projects centered on monarch butterflies. We have two versions of the Fair, a web-based "virtual" version, and a museum-based display version.
The Monarch Fair encourages students to engage in all steps of the research process, including the important final step of data presentation. Teachers of all of the students who participate in the museum-based Fair must have taken our summer class or participated in the monarch monitoring/field research program, but the web-based Fair is open to anyone who submits a research project. If you would like to take part, read on!
Who is eligible?
Students working individually, in small groups, or as whole classes can submit projects.
Home-schooled students or children working with their parents or other adults during the
summer can (and are encouraged to!) submit projects.
What kinds of projects are eligible?
Eligible student research includes indoor (classroom or home) and outdoor projects. The
projects can be experiments in which students manipulate variables, or observational
studies. Both kinds of studies are important and interesting. For example, if students
wanted to study if monarch larvae grow better on swamp milkweed or common milkweed, they
would need to do a controlled experiment in which one group of larvae received swamp
milkweed and another received common milkweed. If they wanted to study how much weight
larvae gain per day, they could simply weigh larvae every day. If your class is raising
monarch larvae, or tagging wild monarchs, there are lots of potential research questions
that they could investigate.
For sample research topics, click here, or check out other projects on the site.
How do we do a project?
This website includes many suggestions for carrying out research projects. For a
step-by-step guide to taking Middle School students through the whole research process,
from coming up with questions to presenting a research report, see our Research Lesson Plans section. For a guided tour
through a single project, see our Guided Tour Through a Research Project. You can
also check out actual project reports by Middle
and High School Students.
How do we submit a project?
Your report should include the following parts in this order: title page, abstract,
introduction, methods, results, discussion or conclusion, acknowledgments, and
bibliography. For details on writing the report, with examples of each section, see our Directions to Authors section. Please send hard copies
or disks with your projects on them to:
Dr. Karen Oberhauser
University of Minnesota
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior
1987 Upper Buford Circle
St. Paul MN 55108
If you can e-mail attachments, it would be best to use Microsoft Word 97 for Windows. Send them to Karen Oberhauser at oberh001@tc.umn.edu.
Monarch Watch Tagging
There is a great deal that we can learn by tagging monarchs as they migrate south in the fall. For information on how you can help with this continent-wide collaborative research project, visit the Monarch Watch website.
University of Minnesota Monitoring Program
Volunteers throughout the US and Canada are working together to determine the factors that affect larval monarch distribution and abundance throughout their breeding season. To find out how you can help with this project, click here.
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Stephanie Friedland - high school student |
Working in Our Lab
Each summer, we have a limited number of research positions for teachers and high school students in our University of Minnesota lab.
Most of these positions are volunteer. Teachers can earn graduate study working on a monarch research project, and high school students can work side-by-side with our research team. For more information on how you or your students can join us, contact Dr. Karen Oberhauser, University of Minnesota, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul MN 55108, 612 624-8706 or oberh001@tc.umn.edu.
Journey North provides an opportunity for teachers and students throughout the world to help track the migratory pathways of many animals, including monarchs. Up-to-the-minute news about migration is exchanged between classrooms as students report observations from their own hometowns. To learn how to connect your students to this "global study of wildlife migration," visit the Journey North website.
ã1999-2000
Monarchs in the Classroom - University of Minnesota
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