Classroom Activities

Classroom activities are ready-made lesson plans for the middle school classroom.  Participants in TIES have designed and tested these lessons to bring students an insight into current biomedical research – in terms of content, context and method.

All classroom activities are tied to Oregon State Benchmarks for science.

Young Scientists at Play: Using pedometers to generate an authenic research experience for students
Experience how creative play and the use of preliminary data empower students to generate research questions. This activity, also known as the Activity Monitoring Project (AMP), includes a series of lessons designed for students to experience the nature of scientific inquiry in biomedical research.

Responsible Research Lesson: Using Mock Review Boards
This lesson was created to introduce middle school science students to the process researchers must navigate in order to complete scientific research using animal or human subjects. Download the accompanying powerpoint presentation.

Government Hearing on Biomedical Research Lesson
Students use their knowledge of biological processes to work in groups researching and analyzing a controversial scientific question. Students consider the values of stakeholders and present solutions to the ethical question in a mock legislative hearing.

Government Hearing on Agricultural Research Lesson
Students use their knowledge of biological processes to work in groups researching and analyzing a controversial scientific question. Students consider the values of stakeholders and present solutions to the ethical question in a mock legislative hearing.

Black Death Lesson
In the first part of this lesson, students experience how easily contagious disease can be transferred through human contact and relate it to how the "Black Death" was spread among members of a community and its devastating impact. In the second part of the lesson, students learn how a pandemic affected 20th century America. Students draw comparisons between the two periods.

Data Collection and Sampling Lesson
How do you know how many samples are enough when conducting an experiment? Students are asked to compare two bags, but only have a limited amount of data to use for their comparisons. Without using any math, students learn about variablity and sample size as they try to solve a medical mystery in Oregon.

Fluid Level Monitoring Lesson
Students experience what it feels like to be be in a clinical study. Students record their fluid intake over many days using recording booklets and learn issues of compliance, data reporting and unique identifiers. Students graph their results and compare their results to class averages.

Ethogram Lesson
Ethograms are observational tools that researchers use to record animal and human behavior.  In these lessons, students learn how to construct and use an ethogram to answer their own scientific inquiry question.
Polar bear videos are available to download for the animal behavior ethogram.

Animal Research Lesson
The use of animals in research, both human and non-human, raises important ethical issues.  In these lessons students tackle questions of how and why animals are used in research, and come up with their own well-informed position on these issues.
Polar bear videos may be used as examples of animals in captivity.

Transgenic Salmon Lesson
This lesson is based on a curriculum from the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research and explores the issues surrounding the farming and consumption of genetically modified salmon.  Using a Town Meeting format, students adopt the roles of different stakeholders and present their viewpoints on the issue.