Hydrology Experiment Design: An Open-Ended Lab to Foster Student Engagement and Critical Thinking

摘要

In traditional civil engineering hydraulics classes, students get little if any hands-on experience with hydrology. Hydrology is typically presented using rainfall-runoff or hydrograph plots and explanations of physical phenomena. Labs that do include hydrology apparati often only demonstrate a simple rainfall-runoff relationship with a saturated, uniform media such as sand. Students do not see effects of slope, vegetation, development, impoundments, and other landscape characteristics, or subsurface flow, infiltration to groundwater, and other hydrologic processes. In addition, it is difficult to relate a basin filled with sand to an actual basin with vegetation, slope, development, etc. This often leads to poor understanding of hydrologic processes and lack of interest.