Testing students' understanding of food webs with Sketchy

Catherine Beckham is a Project WHIRL design team teacher from Shell Point Elementary School. She is a science coordinator in her school with experience in using handheld computers with students. As part of Project WHIRL, she is testing out color Sony Clies with her fifth grade students in class.

Catherine's team is working with a tool called Sketchy, developed initially at the University of Michigan and being augmented as part of Project WHIRL. Sketchy allows students to create their own animations of scientific processes like life cycles or geologic processes. What is unique about Sketchy as an assessment tool is that it provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate what they know visually and lets them show their understanding of something that is often hard for students to see in a flat visual representation-time.

In December, Catherine tried having students in her class use Sketchy to demonstrate their understanding of food webs. The class had discussed the difference between producers and consumers, as well as the difference between a food chain and a food web. She asked her students to demonstrate what they'd learned by creating an animated food web. Students had to label producers and consumers and use arrows to indicate relationships between particular plants or animals ("eater" or "eaten").

From students' animations, Catherine was able to discover that some students had trouble distinguishing between a food chain and a food web. Some students produced a single line of producers eating smaller and smaller animals or plants, a food chain. Others were able to show more complex relationships between producers and consumers, a food web. She noted, "Once we got to the web, they were having trouble visualizing ahead what it would look like once animated." She also said the labels students made helped her discover quickly who got the idea of what a producer and a consumer was: "Because I had them label pictures, I didn't have to worry. Kids did have to explain, 'You're telling me the snake is going to eat the eagle,' because kids were drawing arrows in the wrong direction."

Catherine and the other members of her team will continue to try out ways to use Sketchy in her classroom to learn more about what their students understand about complex processes and cycles in nature.