“Putting concepts - especially the stats - into practice makes it exciting and helps it all make sense!”
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You’ll work at the Exeter Campus , followed by a week spent in the picturesque, 1000 acre Margam Country Park in South Wales during the Easter vacation. This course teaches you how to be a scientist: You’ll learn how to design and conduct observational and experimental studies of real behaviours in the wild; how to analyse your own results and so strengthen your statistical abilities; how to ask clear questions and interpret your results so as to answer them; and how to execute and structure writing up your own research project in a scientific manner, on a topic that interests you. |
The first five weeks of the course are spent in Exeter, working in small groups, designing and executing studies looking at human behaviour. In previous years students have observed sex differences in shopping behaviours in local super markets, manipulated photographs of students to better understand our mate choices, and mixed up milkshakes to test feeding preferences.
We all go to Margam Park, South Wales, in the Easter vacation. Here, we start with a series of small group practicals over the first three days, each of which focuses on a specific behaviour (e.g. predator evasion, personality effects, mate guarding, risk aversion, sexual advertisement, foraging decisions) and makes use of a particular statistical test (e.g. t-tests, ANOVA, correlations, chi-square, GLMs). These give you an opportunity to learn how to ask questions, design methods, collect your own data and analyse the results. You’ll write up a series of these mini-reports whilst on the course, with staff on hand to guide you through the process. We then spend the next three days designing and executing mini-projects in small groups, in conjunction with researchers. These are hugely varied and allow you to pursue your own particular questions of interest. In previous years, students have looked at: Habitat choices by deer; Mate guarding in freshwater shrimps; Social networks in waterstriders; Heritability of personality in sheep and their lambs; Alarm responses in songbirds; Widow effects in humans; Sexual coercion in ducks. These are written up on your return from Wales.
Alongside learning research techniques, you’ll gain experience in how to make observations in the wild without disturbing your subjects, whether humans or other animals. If you like wildlife, this is an excellent opportunity to get up close to deer, buzzards, badgers, woodpeckers, kingfishers, adders, slow-worms and farm animals, as well as less obvious, but equally stunning tiger beetles, whirligigs, water striders, migrant birds and sticklebacks.
We all go to Margam Park, South Wales, in the Easter vacation. Here, we start with a series of small group practicals over the first three days, each of which focuses on a specific behaviour (e.g. predator evasion, personality effects, mate guarding, risk aversion, sexual advertisement, foraging decisions) and makes use of a particular statistical test (e.g. t-tests, ANOVA, correlations, chi-square, GLMs). These give you an opportunity to learn how to ask questions, design methods, collect your own data and analyse the results. You’ll write up a series of these mini-reports whilst on the course, with staff on hand to guide you through the process. We then spend the next three days designing and executing mini-projects in small groups, in conjunction with researchers. These are hugely varied and allow you to pursue your own particular questions of interest. In previous years, students have looked at: Habitat choices by deer; Mate guarding in freshwater shrimps; Social networks in waterstriders; Heritability of personality in sheep and their lambs; Alarm responses in songbirds; Widow effects in humans; Sexual coercion in ducks. These are written up on your return from Wales.
Alongside learning research techniques, you’ll gain experience in how to make observations in the wild without disturbing your subjects, whether humans or other animals. If you like wildlife, this is an excellent opportunity to get up close to deer, buzzards, badgers, woodpeckers, kingfishers, adders, slow-worms and farm animals, as well as less obvious, but equally stunning tiger beetles, whirligigs, water striders, migrant birds and sticklebacks.