Different Kinds Of Activities To Help Students To Learn Forensics

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To meet these goals, Sharon designed literacy activities that would allow students to use forensics skills, concepts, and procedures in relevant ways.

For example, students practiced and gained proficiency with inquiry skills by analyzing diagrams or sketches of crime scenes and writing their explanations of the crime. Crime scene sketches and activities like these were taken from the Internet from lesson plans done by teachers at other schools or from commercial sources such as the Home school Learning Network.

Students also practiced their inquiry skills by reading a list of clues, writing a story to explain the crime depicted by the clues, and identifying a suspect, an activity used in other science classrooms (Gaither, 1999). Crime ...
... sequencing activities in which students read and ordered a list of events in a murder gave students practice in understanding and organizing evidence to solve crimes
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Students also read mystery stories taken from lesson plans for forensics in the classroom, such as those posted by TruTV and the Shodor Education Foundation, which challenged them to solve crimes by using inductive and deductive reasoning. Students discussed their tentative solutions with one another, wrote their ideas about what happened, and filled in missing gaps in the stories.

This activity promoted a type of higher order thinking used daily by forensic scientists that requires analysis, deductive thinking, and reasoning (Colgan, 2002).

Chemistry students participating in the unit used a variety of forensic techniques, including teeth impressions, fingerprinting, lip printing, chromatography, blood spatter projections, handwriting analysis, footprint analysis, metric analysis, and chemical analysis.

They used these methods to explore the two major types of evidence found at a crime scene—physical and chemical. Students distinguished between various types of evidence and analyzed teacher-constructed crime scenes by using physical properties (e.g., shape, size, color, and texture), chemical properties (e.g., reactivity, flammability, odor, and taste), chemical reactions in filtration labs, and separation of mixtures in chromatography labs.

Students compared their samples to known types provided on handouts. For example, students studied lip prints (a process called cheiloscopy) by taking their own lip prints and comparing them to the five basic types of lip prints—diamond, long vertical, short vertical, rectangular, or branching grooves—that are used by forensic scientists. The lips prints were shown on a handout taken from the Internet. Students read the accompanying news article from the Associated Press that explained how lip prints on a window were used as evidence to convict a peeping Tom.

One of the students' favorite activities was taking their own fingerprints and comparing them to the three basic types of fingerprints—the arch, the whorl, and the loop—clues that scientists use to determine suspects in a crime. Students compared their own prints to those basic types and to the 11 variations of those types that were classified on a handout (Gaither, 1999).

This was a popular activity because the forensics television programs that the students watched often showed fingerprint evidence. Students also practiced their inquiry skills by analyzing 10 suspects' fingerprints to identify a criminal from a fictional police department's suspect record (Fulton, Alderman, & Sanders, 1993).