The dinosaur footprint puzzle is an interesting way to engage students in an investigation and discussion of dinosaurs. The footprint puzzle is an activity that has been used by science teachers for a long time. It was first used in the text Investigating the Earth a middle school science textbook.
After living and roaming the earth for hundreds of millions of years during the Mesozoic Period, nearly all of them died on one day. The day the dinosaurs died occurred 66 millions years ago when an asteroid collided with the earth.
All the dinosaurs didn’t die in one day. However, according to Don Peck, most of them surely died on that day. Here’s why. A large asteroid slammed into the earth at 45,000 miles per hour. Unimaginable earthquakes split and shook the ground like never before. Tsunami’s reached land thousands of miles from the point of impact.
Plants, animals and other living organisms were pelted with hog gases and fragments. A mass extinction of life on the earth was underway. Fires worse than we can imagine lit up the earth. A layer of sulfur dioxide lingered above the earth Interrupting the path of solar energy causing a cooling disruption of the earth’s weather. It wasn’t a good time for life on the earth. About 96 percent of all marine species and about 75% of species on land died. All the forests of the earth were destroyed and it took millions of years for them to come back.
Origin of the Dinosaur Footprint Puzzle
The footprint puzzle was a lab activity used in a chapter on paleontology.Two sets of footprints that the authors explained represented two distinct footprint paths created by two different dinosaurs. The drawing was based on the Paluxy dinosaur tracks found in rocks in Texas. A photograph of the tracks as seen in rocks was are shown here next to two adaptations of the dinosaur footprint puzzle. After students have worked with adaptation 1, provide them with the 2nd adaptation.
Is Process More Important than Content?
Given this background, we now turn to the Ault and Dodick research paper, “The Footprint Puzzle: A Problem with Process. The authors argue that “the history of the Footprints Puzzle demonstrates that an enduring adherence to “a process approach” obscures how conceptualization intertwines with methodology.” The authors provide an interesting analysis of how science educators have embraced the idea of “process” perhaps to the detriment of embracing recent findings on how students learn. Here is the abstract of the research paper:
For many decades, science educators have asked, “In what ways should learning the content of traditional subjects serve as the means to more general ends, such as understanding the nature of science or the processes of scientific inquiry?” Acceptance of these ends reduces the role of disciplinary context; the “Footprints Puzzle” and Oregon’s “Inquiry Scoring Guide” illustrate this point. In the Footprints Puzzle, students are challenged to distinguish observations from inferences to learn about the nature of science or the culture of science. Oregon’s Inquiry Scoring Guide separates content knowledge from inquiry skills.
Given long-standing discredit of “the” scientific method, modern views emphasize the diversity of inquiry methods and explanatory ideals across disciplines. Paleontologists, for example, reconstruct the behavior of extinct beasts from fossil footprints using methods of inquiry responsive to this aim. Figuring out dinosaur locomotion depends upon making analogies to the limb structure and behavior of extant species. The history of the Footprints Puzzle demonstrates that an enduring adherence to “a process approach” obscures how conceptualization intertwines with methodology. A discipline’s concepts themselves, such as “extinction” and “geologic time,” function as tools of inquiry in distinctive and productive ways.
Create a Context for Inquiry
Ault & Dodick use the Footprint Puzzle as an example of how a conceptually-based activity which was developed within a context of paleontology and geology in the ESCP materials, has, over the years, been used to teach the process of science, and in so doing looses the initial potential of the activity. The authors take aim at the National Science Education Standards, as well as publications by Bell and Settlage & Southerland, and others, and infer that the authors of these texts have perpetuated the process skills approach, and a generic approach to scientific inquiry.
They argue that the nature of inquiry for a paleontologist, for example, is different than an a chemist. In particular, they see that the using the process approach without creating a disciplinary context for inquiry shortchanges the students, and removes a sense of true inquiry. The authors are concerned that the NSES opts for a unifying or generic approach to science inquiry, and puts the emphasis on students learning the processes of science as if they were content. A useful quote from their article is helpful here:
Mary Budd Rowe, a scholar whose contributions to inquiry science remain unsurpassed (e.g., the role of language, wait-time, and fate control; Rowe, 1978), believed in the appeal to students of science as specially crafted stories about the natural world (Bianchini, 2008)—as meaningful interpretations of experiences (“experiments” being a particular type of experience). Paleontological interpretation of fossil dinosaur footprints is one such story. To learn this story means to journey through the landscape of genuine fossil artifacts guided by the imagery of evolutionary thought—to engage in disciplined inquiry. Paleontological inquiry, representative of the importance of context to observing and inferring in particular ways, promises fascinating stories that amplify experience with meaning (Ault & Ault, 2009).
The authors also suggest that within the disciplines (chemistry, biology, geology, etc.), concepts serve as tools of inquiry. They put it this way:
Within disciplines, concepts function as tools of inquiry as well as categories for organizing thought. To ascertain their meaning is to inquire about their use. This philosophical point of view (Wittgenstein’s) generates the question, “How do geologists use the concept of ‘time’ in their inquiries and explanations?” (Ault, 1980). In paleontology, in a very broad sense, the concept of geologic time is a tool of inquiry that functions as a referee among competing histories—if the time relationships do not hold, both in terms of synchrony and sequence (e.g., exactly when each set of superimposed footprints was laid down), then the account becomes suspect (Ault, 1980, 1998; McPhee, 1993).
Use the Tools of the Geologist
For these authors simply using the dinosaur footprint puzzle to help students simply learn about observation and inference is to miss the opportunity to use the tools of inquiry of the geologist to analyze the behavior and structure of dinosaurs. The authors of the footprint paper appear stressed that many authors have used to puzzle as an observation/inference activity, and have indeed changed the context from fossils to animals in snow, or birds in a park!
In the end, Ault and Dodick tell us:
Across four decades, the Footprints Puzzle has emphasized a generic view of the relationship between observation and inference, strongly suggesting exaggeration in any reports of the demise of teaching science-as-process. Only incidentally does the lesson uncover an approach to solving paleontological problems, the challenge to thinking presented by actual data, the limit to inference stemming from the discipline’s characteristic “historical-comparative method” (Gould, 1986), the disciplined use of appropriate analogies to make inferences, or the “retrodictive” and “singular” style (i.e., predicting the order of events in the past with time-as-referee) of making inferences (Kitts,1977) endemic to the geosciences.
I’ve used the Footprints Puzzle over the past 40 years as a tool in teaching and in writing. I first saw the footprint puzzle in the ESCP laboratory manual while I was teaching at Lexington High School (Massachusetts) in 1965. Bob Champlin and Art Latham were field test center teachers at Lexington High for the first try-out of the ESCP course in 1965. Bob Champlin and I teamed up and did our master’s thesis “A Comparative Study of Two Earth Science Courses,” for our Master’s degree at Boston University in 1966.
Using the Dinosaur Footprint Puzzle
The first time I used the Footprints Puzzle was while I was a participant with 30 science educators from around the country in an ESCP Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland in the summer of 1969–two weeks after NASA astronauts landed on the moon.
The 3-week institute was funded by the NSF and Directed by Marjorie Gardner, and was designed to prepare ten-three-person teams to conduct ESCP teacher training institutes at our respective colleges (I was about to graduate from Ohio State and take a position at Georgia State).
Each of us were asked to design a lesson from the ESCP materials, and in a micro-teaching/video taping format, teach the lesson to a group of middle school students. I designed a lesson using the footprints to help the students learn about dinosaurs.
The Footprints Puzzle was included in Adventures in Geology as a geology inquiry activity in this 1989 book.
Over the years, I used it with students in science teacher education courses as a process of science activity, and used it in geology courses to help students study fossils.
In a 1989 publication, Adventures in Geology published by the American Geological Institute, I designed an activity using the footprints entitled “the curious geologist.” In the context of a book on geology, teachers could use the activity to help students learn about fossils, geological structures, and dinosaurs.
In 1991, I began a teaching-consulting career with the Bureau of Education and Research, and designed a seminar on cooperative learning that was presented to more than 10,000 teachers. I used the footprint puzzle activity as a geology investigation, but my purpose in the seminar was to show how this geological inquiry could be implemented in the classroom using principles of cooperative learning.
I later included this in a chapter of my book, Science as Inquiry, which was published by Goodyear Publishing in 2000. I also used the footprint activity in Minds on Science in 1992, The Art of Teaching Science, Editions 1 & 2 in 2005 & 2009.
So as you can see, I’ve made good use of the Footprints Puzzle, and I do admit that I’ve used it in many contexts.
Research
Tracking the Footprints Puzzle by Charles R. Ault, Jr. and Jeff Dodick is the research basis for this post.
The article was especially interesting for me since I have used the Footprint Puzzle for more than 40 years and have included the activity in books I’ve published, and seminars I’ve done with teachers around North America.
Ault, C., & Dodick, J. (2010). Tracking the Footprints Puzzle: The problematic persistence of science-as-process in teaching the nature and culture of science Science Education, 94 (6), 1092-1122 DOI: 10.1002/sce.20398
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