Article: The Peanut Pageant: Engaging Students in Contemporary Science Controversies

THE PEANUT OBSERVATION ACTIVITY (see below) has become a classic exercise for teaching the skills of observation, and several authors have described strategies for connecting it with other learning goals.1 For years we have been using the peanut activity to help our middle grades students to engage in an informed and personally relevant debate of the ethics of scientific research, particularly of research using animals. We accomplish this by holding a "peanut pageant," and have enjoyed so much success that we thought we'd share the idea.

Peanut observation activity

To start the peanut observation activity, each student is given a peanut and asked to observe it and record their observations, ...

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