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Research Quest In Your Classroom

Research Quest is a series of free online investigations created by the Natural History Museum of Utah for middle school teachers and students.These investigations engage your students in a variety of virtual museum activities designed by and featuring our all-star team of scientists and educators. The investigations will not only challenge your students with a real-world, phenomenon-based scientific mystery, they will also model how research scientists search for evidence and how they use critical thinking to answer scientific questions.

Next, your students will explore digitized museum collections and data to gather their own evidence for the research question at-hand. Depending on the investigation, your class might observe the nooks and crannies of a 3D image scan of a dinosaur jaw or examine aerial photos of pine trees to research the impacts of change in a montane environment. Throughout their work, your students will record their evidence and reasoning in their Research Assistant Notebooks, and test their ideas by sharing them with their classmates.

Research Quest is amazing! It brings to life a problem facing actual scientists and encourages students to use real-world skills to create and justify their opinion. Critical thinking is such a necessary skill for our students and this experience helps them to work through a problem step-by-step as they come to a conclusion. The tools are interactive, the information is easy to understand, and the resources allow for differentiation and collaboration in class. I can't wait to let my students loose with this program!

Heather Threlkeld, Legacy Prepatory Academy, 8th grade, Charter

Why Register?

It’s free!

Full access to all investigations and their activities.

Instructional Guides, Research Assistant Notebooks, and more for each investigation.

Assessment rubrics for student learning