University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lesson 3: How do planarians regenerate?

This lesson is part of the unit:

Lesson Description:

Students are introduced to the use of planarians as a model for neural regeneration through a historical overview about planarians as a model organism and a basic exploration of planarian biology. In this lesson, students design and carry out an experiment focused on developing their understanding of regeneration. Students do this by cutting planarians in different ways based on an explicit hypothesis they develop. Over the course of several days, students record a range of observations about their planarians’ regeneration.
In the conclusion of Lesson 3, included as a separate lesson plan, students analyze their data in order to evaluate their hypothesis and draw scientific conclusions about planarian regeneration. Groups of students present their findings to the rest of the class, which effectively concludes the regeneration experiment.

Materials last updated:

Oct 30, 2012

Lesson materials:

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