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.

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.

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.

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.