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Exposing Problems Teaching Students Morphological Species Identification, Trevor Stamper, Lauren Weidner, Gregory Nigoghosian, Ludmila D. Nunes
Exposing Problems Teaching Students Morphological Species Identification, Trevor Stamper, Lauren Weidner, Gregory Nigoghosian, Ludmila D. Nunes
IMPACT Presentations
When dealing with physical remains, morphological assessment for species is a traditional approach to entomological specimen identification. A dichotomous key guides the user through taxa determination for a specimen by providing a series of dual-choice nodes that center around morphological differences. Each nodal choice leads to either a new set of dichotomous choices or a taxa decision. We evaluated student’s ability to utilize a dichotomous key down to species for a limited set of taxa, by reviewing their nodal decisions along with their confidence level using a Likert scale (1-5).
Along with individual decision recording, students conducted a post-decision group …