Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Three elementary school teachers - two from Corvallis and one from Albany - are conducting fieldwork with Oregon State University scientists at the Las Cruces Biological Station in Costa Rica this month.

As they band birds and track pollinators, the teachers will communicate with their pupils through a blog and enable students to share information with their counterparts in Costa Rica.

The research is supported by a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation to Matthews Betts, associate professor in the OSU College of Forestry. The goal is to understand how hummingbirds and other pollinators are affected by land use patterns.

Teachers participating in the project include Claudia Argo and Alleya Jack from Garfield Elementary School in Corvallis and Cindy Drouhard from the Timber Ridge School in Albany. They will be at the field station from Feb. 16 to March 1.

"This project has all the elements of a real-world learning experience," said Kari O'Connell, an educator with Oregon State's Oregon Natural Resources Education Program. "The students will be doing math, science and art and practicing their language skills. It also involves their families. One of the teachers has already translated information into Spanish so that Spanish-speaking families in Oregon can be involved."

While in Costa Rica, the teachers will help researchers observe and band hummingbirds, O'Connell added. "They all teach science, so they will be talking with their students about what it's like to do fieldwork, collect data and interpret it."