Students from the Nobleboro Central School and the Jefferson Village School got a unique learning experience Feb. 9, when they visited the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland.
The Institute started five years ago and is part science museum, part interactive classroom. They strive to give kids a chance to learn for themselves.
“We tried to make this place as far from a traditional classroom as possible,” said Chief Innovation Officer Alan Lishness. “There’s an attentiveness that comes from not knowing where you are.”
It’s built on a faith in the potential of students; “Kids will always rise to meet your expectations,” Lishness said.
Fifth and sixth grade students from around the state are given free range of a space comprising four stations, each emphasizing a different scientific question. Right now, the theme is “Lobsters: Untold Tales.”
One station asks the students to figure out what larval lobsters eat. They have a microscope with slides of potential food sources and cards with information. Other information is presented on a video screen and some is heard through overhead speakers.
“Everyone learns differently, and we’ve tried to accommodate as many learning styles as we can,” Lishness said. “The important thing is that the kids are on their own.”
No one prompts the children to assign roles within their groups or instructs them how to tackle each question. There are some instructions at the station, but the kids have to sort out the details themselves.
“What we’re doing is letting the kids discover the scientific method by having them use it to answer real questions and do real exploration,” Lishness said.
In five years, he’s never seen a failure. The only group Lishness has ever seen really struggle with the stations was a group of Ph.Ds that came through to try out the facility.
“As soon as it told them to take a picture of themselves [using the built in cameras], they all started debating,” Lishness said. “By the time they were done discussing the first step, they had missed the next three instructions.”
At the Institute, the students watched live lobsters in an aquarium to see their habitat, handled live lobsters to explore their physical adaptations to their environment, studied larval lobsters and their feeding habits, and got a lesson in resource economics dealing with managing common resources.
The student’s economics lesson involved the kids deciding how many traps they wanted to fish in a simulated ocean and watching their profits change based on their expenses, lobster populations and the number of lobster they were catching.
“We’re doing research into young people’s attitudes towards common pool resources that’s never been done before,” Lishness said. “From what we’ve seen, it’s a concept that children take to much more easily than adults.”
The idea of including a section on resource management was inspired by research done at Monhegan Island by resource economist Carl Wilson. Wilson believed that lobstermen could make as much or more money if they fished fewer traps – an idea that Lishness said is counterintuitive to most adults.
Wilson convinced the lobstermen at Monhegan to test his idea, and they reduced their trap counts from the 800-trap state limit to 600 traps. The lobstermen made more money.
Because their costs were lower and there were fewer total traps in the water, they were making more money per trap, and their profits were higher. Wilson determined that the optimal number of traps for a lobsterman at Monhegan was 350.
When he was able to get them to trust his hypothesis, the trial showed that the lobstermen made even more money at 350 traps than at 600 or 800.
The children at the Institute were told that story, and then asked how many traps they wanted to put in the water. Lishness said that in almost every case, the kids start at 800 traps, and when the lobster population starts to decline and they start making less money, they decrease the number of traps.
The kids aren’t told that the population is declining, only that they are making less money. On their own, the students almost always draw the conclusion that they need to put fewer traps in the water to keep their expenses low, Lishness said.
As the students move through the stations, they record videos of their findings and take pictures of things they observe. The videos and pictures are put on personalized web pages for each group, which they can access from home or their classroom when they get back to school.
These web pages are used for follow-up activities at school.
“The kids bring a lot home with them – and so do I,” said Cindy Sabina, a sixth-grade teacher at NCS. “It’s terrific. They have this wonderful hands-on experience and it inspires teachers to try different things.”
Samantha Burke, Julie Spinney and Helena Robertson, all sixth graders at JVS, worked in a group throughout the field trip.
When asked if they enjoyed it, they responded with a simultaneous, “Oh yeah!”
Burke liked the aquarium, Spinney like the resource management game and Robertson liked taking pictures, but they agreed that day was fun and a welcome change from the classroom.
For the institute’s administrators, the goal is also to be a change from a typical museum. When they were designing the Institute, they did research into how people approach exhibits at traditional aquariums.
They found that the average time people spend at each exhibit is only 30 seconds, Lishness said. Lishness thought this was far too short.
“We wanted people to really engage with the information, so we made all of the content dependent on the participants,” he said.
The kids take the pictures and they work the microscopes. They answer questions and study things for themselves, rather than looking at a display.
For schools, the field trip is an ideal way to put the students in a different kind of environment, because the Institute fully funds the field trips for every school – right down to chartering a bus to bring them there.
The Institute’s goal is to get 90 percent of all fifth and sixth grade students – distributed evenly around the state – through the museum once each year. So far, the closest they’ve come is 87 percent two years ago, Lishness said.
The museum is largely dependent on private donors and lost a lot of funding in the fall of 2008 with the economic downturn. They had to scale back significantly, but funding is slowly coming back and they’re ramping up their efforts again. Lishness is optimistic about the future.
“Funding is the only barrier, and we will solve it,” he said.
It’s important to the institute that they reach kids throughout Maine, not just from Southern and Midcoast Maine.
“We want to foster a scientifically literate population, and the only way to do that is provide for everybody and everybody equally,” Lishness said. “In some groups from farther inland, 80 percent of the kids have never seen the ocean.”
