Artifact 4: Human Population Growth
In this human population growth project, students assumed the role of 'demographer' and worked in research pairs to analyze international census data to better understand global human population growth. When I planned this project, I had two basic learning objectives in mind: students would learn about the topic of population growth and experience how scientists perform basic scientific research. Only after reflecting back upon this activity did I realize how deeply embedded scientific literacy was in this project. In this population project, students worked in pairs to learn how to calculate percent annual growth rate. This step required students to study and explain in their activity packets how to calculate growth rate and explain what it means for a growth rate to be positive, zero, or negative. Then, students designed their own study of international population growth rates by choosing two countries to analyze: a more developed country and a less developed country. Students formulated hypotheses regarding which country would have the higher and lower growth rate. In these hypotheses, students had to explain the reasoning behind their hypotheses. Students then collected data on each country from a fairly complex government website (International Data Base Census Bureau website) and interpreted this data. Student interpretation included the construction of population pyramid graphs, careful examination of differences in the shapes of the graphs, and evaluation of factors affecting the shape of the population pyramids. At the conclusion of this project, we created a large graph on the wall outside the classroom. Students hung up their country flipbooks as data points on the graph, according to growth rate and fertility rate. The next day, we used this visualization and spent the first part of class discuss the trends we saw in the data; students had the opportunity to explain their countries' overall census data, provide explanations for their data (more developed vs. less developed, access to birth control, access to cutting edge medical care, access to medicine, predominance of urban vs. rural areas, etc.) and identify where their specific countries lay on the growth rate graph.