Secondary School Field Research Program

Lamont-Doherty’s Secondary School Field Research Program (SSFRP) is a project based instructional program focused on wetlands and marine environments of New York. SSFRP offers high school students, undergraduate students, and science teachers research experience with support from Lamont research mentors. The core of this program is authentic field and laboratory research in small teams. Students and teachers prepare by reading and discussing results of prior year’s experiments, science journal articles about Piermont marsh and Hudson River. Students then break into research teams, review and refine their sampling protocols, and develop a sample plan for the summer. Research topics evolve with our scientific knowledge and interests. Current projects include sedimentation, natural carbon sequestration, hydrology, microplastics, and more. After the data are analyzed, each team creates a research poster and presentation to share their work at the end of the summer symposium. Each summer we augment research team activities with structured lectures on topics related to our teams’ study areas. Each week there are journal readings and student-led article discussions. Students present weekly in our “share out”, and they are required to generate an oral presentation and a team poster to present their work at the end of the summer symposium. The center of each student’s experience is their research team; and the focus of the teams is on generating high quality data. Rigorous protocols are followed; students do all their own data analysis; and results are potentially publishable.