Natural Sciences
• Your topic must relate to a concept mentioned in class during the defined time period, unless I pre-approve your idea. In later assignments, you may also draw connections between concepts from different parts of the course. • You Behavior Explainer must not simply regurgitate the course material. Make sure that you teach us something new that wasn’t covered in class. • You must include two sources from the primary literature either in the Behavior Explainer itself or in the Scientific Summary—see below. One of my main goals for this assignment is for you to get used to searching for and citing appropriate literature. • Go beyond just a list of facts about an odd animal. Don’t make it a report that could have come out of Wikipedia, but tell us why your subject matters. So, for example, if you decide to focus on an odd animal, then give us an answer to “Why should we care about this weird animal?” (This is the challenge faced by any grant writer. It’s not enough to say “I want to study this weird critter”—you have to discuss any larger lesson you might learn.) • Your target audience is adults with some knowledge of biology. Please do not direct your Behavior Explainer at children. No children’s books, please!
• Make sure your Behavior Explainer includes behavior! Although behavior and morphology are intertwined, and it is OK to talk about morphological adaptations that an animal has, be sure to integrate it with behavior as your main focus. • I hope that your projects will go beyond the basics—a PowerPoint slide presentation is OK, but this is a chance to stretch your creative muscles a bit. Please make sure that at least one of your projects is not a PowerPoint slide presentation. Creativity counts! An uninspired presentation about “facts about platypus” will get an uninspired grade. There’s lots of ways to be inspiring, though! Connect your ideas to bigger ideas, describe experiments in a clever way, put in leading questions or ideas for future work. Your Scientific Summary A second component of your project is a Scientific Summary of approximately one to one and a half pages. This is meant to explain your goals in the project to me. (That is, it is written for me, not for your audience for your Behavior Explainer.) In your summary: • Identify the concept(s) from class you are trying to connect with. Give enough detail here so that I can see that you understand the concepts. Be sure that you are connecting to one of the required topics. • Describe the literature sources you are including in enough detail so that I can see that you have read them and understand them (see the next section for more detail about choosing your sources). If it is a long paper with many experiments, you may not need to go into all of them. Why did you pick them? • Include information about your artistic decisions. Why did you pick the format you did? • Make sure it is easy to read with correct spelling and grammar.
• State whether or not you used AI in any way, to create either words or an image. If you did use AI, provide the prompt(s) that you gave and the answer you got. • Please tell me what part of your Behavior Explainer you created. For example, some people included amazing original drawings, and others put together new drawings by combining images or drawings from the web. Be sure to tell me what you use, and credit their source. Choosing and citing your sources • I strongly recommend Web of Science to find your sources; it is a better option than Google Scholar. Anything you find on Web of Science counts as a legitimate source. • Your Behavior Explainer should draw on material from at least two legitimate primary sources. Journal articles in Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Behavioral Ecology, and other journals definitely count as legitimate sources. It is OK to cite a reputable website (e.g., an NIH or NSF website, ScienceDaily.com, etc.), but these do not count as your primary sources. Wikipedia does not count as a reputable website as there is no guarantee that it is written by experts. • The two primary sources must be experimental in nature. Please do not choose review papers for the upcoming Behavior Explainers, even in they are listed in Web of Science. Look for papers with Methods and Results sections and data. Unsure about whether something is a review paper? Just ask! • If I talk about a paper extensively in class or if I assign a paper for you to read, you may cite it, but it does not count as one of your two sources. • Be sure to download and read the papers you cite! It is not OK to just read the abstract. You must upload PDFs of the papers you have found. • Demonstrate that you have read and understood the papers by describing the experiments either in the Behavior Explainer or in the Scientific Summary. • Indicate in your work where the information came from by using in-text citations (in the Scientific Summary) or including the citations in the Behavior Explainer itself, if appropriate (see formatting instructions below). In the past, a handful of people had papers listed in their references, but there was no indication of how or where that information was incorporated—and some of the papers didn’t seem at all related to the material in either the Behavior Explainer or the Scientific Summary, so I could not give credit. • Cite the source for any fact that is not common knowledge. The exception to this rule is that you do not have to cite the source for the material presented in lecture. Please do not cite me for the information I give in lecture; I was not the one who discovered the information. • Cite the sources for figures and drawings that you incorporate into your Behavior Explainer. • Please do not use direct quotes! Instead, paraphrase your source, being careful not to plagiarize. (Yes, I do run these through TurnItIn, and yes, I have caught plagiarists.)
Only use direct quotes if the wording is absolutely necessary to retain in its original. For example, you might use a direct quote from Darwin about a particular phenomenon to open a Behavior Explainer. My topic: Investigate how dolphins use signature whistles to identify themselves and communicate with pod members. I need help create the creative newspaper (I include the example).I paid 2 pages to create the newspaper and 2 pages for scientific summary. I also included some of the slides we learn in class, please go over them, because we need to talk about them in summary and also go beyond that. The Professor wants something new other than just the information we learn in class.
