Development of biodiversity teaching materials for high school biology

Abstract

In recent years, growing concerns have been raised about the decline in biodiversity, in parallel with increases in the importance of “biodiversity and ecosystem” classes in high schools. In this study, we developed teaching materials for biodiversity education. In the development of materials teaching about the “biodiversity of freshwater fishes,” fieldwork was conducted by setting a survey site at Shingashi River (Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture); a total of 136 surveys (of fish and the environment) were conducted in summer, fall, and winter. In each survey, a total of 12 species of fish, including the threatened Oryzias latipes and invasive Micropterus dolomieu, and environmental data were obtained, from which a dataset for teaching materials was created. The application of these teaching materials at a high school enabled each learner to analyze data such as “mean value,” “variance,” “standard deviation,” “boxplot,” “scatter plot,” “correlation coefficient”, and test hypotheses about biodiversity. Exploration activities using these teaching materials can be expected to enable more advanced learning in the fields of ecology, statistics, and information processing, depending on what the learner has learned in advance. We will continue to explore the possibilities provided by these teaching materials in future work.