ENVR 400 · Research Project in Environmental Science

Instructor-guided collaboration between student teams and community partners on community-based environmental science projects. Teams articulate project questions and goals, devise methods, conduct research and communicate results. Credit will be given for only one of ENVR 400 or ENVR 449. [3-0-0;3-0-0] Prerequisite: ENVR 300.

 Course Availability & Schedule

Learning Goals

  • Students will learn to understand, evaluate, and synthesize relevant environmental information from a variety of quantitative and qualitative information sources and viewpoints and draw reasonable conclusions.
  • Students will learn to apply a subset of the major technical tools used in environmental science (e.g., models, statistical analysis, network monitoring, population surveys, …..).
  • Students will formulate and ask multiple relevant and testable research questions about the environment, and conduct an investigation designed to answer such questions.
  • Students will communicate a coherent synthesis and analysis of environmental information, orally, graphically, and in writing.
  • Students will effectively work on team projects, playing all possible roles within the team.
  • Students will acquire substantive knowledge in at least one area of environmental science.

Instructors

Tara Ivanochko and Michael Lipsen

Course Content

Students work in interdisciplinary teams to undertake a collaborative research project spanning terms 1 and 2. The project groups will be guided by the course instructors. Deliverables for the project are distributed over term 1 and term 2, and include the following milestones: development of group guidelines and thesis title, a thesis outline and work plan, an ethical review request, progress reports and a final project report.

Also see the Environmental Sciences home page.