Step 1: Jot down your ideas and share with a partner.
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Do you think cows are smart? Why, or why not?
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If you wanted to try to figure out how smart cows really are, what might you do to test their intelligence?
Step 2: Read a Times article about a recent study.
Read the New York Times article “Do Cows Use Tools? This One Does.” published on Jan. 19. It begins:
For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined pastures. And when she has an itch, she scratches it — by expertly wielding a stick.
Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated even more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body. It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts.
Step 3: Analyze the study.
1. What was the scientific question that researchers wanted to answer?
2. How did researchers plan and carry out their investigation?
3. What do you notice in the videos above? What do they reveal?
4. What new data did the investigation yield? (Data is the factual information collected during observations, experiments or studies.)
5. What explanation did researchers construct using the data they collected and interpreted to answer their original question?
6. What significance does this research have for science, the world or our lives?
Step 4: Work with others to come up with your own scientific investigation.
In this study, researchers tried to better understand if one specific cow, Veronika, a 13-year-old cow in Austria, could use a wooden broom to solve a problem or address an issue. Collaborate with others to propose another scientific investigation about animal cognition. For example, a scientist might want to investigate whether pigs could play simple video games using a joystick.
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What scientific question might you want to answer?
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Briefly describe how you might design a study using similar techniques mentioned in the article to try to answer that question.
More?
• Science Practice, a new resource aligned with the Science and Engineering Practices for the Next Generation Science Standards, aims to help students better understand how scientists actively gather evidence-based knowledge and solve problems. Learn more about this feature in this introductory post.
• See all the lesson plans in this series.
The post Science Practice | A Study on Cow Tool Use appeared first on New York Times.
