The 15 UC Davis students toe the banks of Putah Creek, west of campus, eager to cast their lines. A tadpole surfaces and darts back to the muddy bottom. A crawfish seeking prey pokes through the thick algae. Dragonflies and butterflies glide across the creek.

An errant soccer ball, now a Putah Creek trophy, bobs like a gigantic cork. Off in the distance, a boastful rooster crows.

It's the beginning of the fall quarter on the UCD campus. But these students are not skipping class.

They're taking it.

Forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey, an adjunct professor in the UCD Department of Entomology, annually teaches AB15-A, a two-unit animal biology course that "introduces students to the scientific method as a continuous process."

For one-day of the quarter, Kimsey takes his students -- in groups of and teams of two -- fishing.

Equipped with permits from the Department of Fish and Game, he demonstrates "the methods and practice of sampling fishes using common techniques from fisheries biology," include seines, fish traps or cages, cast nets, and rods and reels.

"Bob is one of our most outstanding instructors in the Department of Entomology," said Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the UCD Department of Entomology. "He is truly dedicated to the students and strives to get them to 'think' in this and other outdoor classrooms rather than simply memorize and regurgitate facts."

Although most students are acquainted with the scientific

method, few at the undergraduate level "have ever actually carried a scientific inquiry from conception to completion," said Kimsey, who is known for his teaching excellence and commitment to students (he was named the 2006 Outstanding Educator in the College of Biological Sciences).

"Even in high school students often memorize the various steps in this process but come away with no concept of the intense effort required to logically set out and then carry out a research project."

The day before class, Kimsey paddled out in his canoe to set the fish cages. The next morning, at the edge of the creek, he discussed the history of fishing and demonstrated how to catch them. Students took turns paddling with him to check the fish traps.

Some students had never fished before. No problem. Kimsey and his teaching assistant, Amy Morice, an entomology graduate student, showed them how, along with student and veteran angler Sarah Pereverzieu, who for the last three summers has worked as a nature guide at the Alisal Guest Ranch, Solvang, "One of my duties was to teach guests how to fish," Pereverzieu said.

All total, the 15 students caught two fish, several crawfish, a tadpole, algae, a tree branch, tree leaves and a rash. Stacy Williams of Orange, Calif., hooked a small sunfish while Shannon Kaefer of Salinas, reeled in a small largemouth bass. The seines, weighted nets that float along the top of the surface, snared the lone tadpole, while the fishing traps yielded the crawfish.

Kimsey was pleased. "Scientific inquiry begins with a question about possible relationships among preliminary observations," he said. "Here students ask questions they choose from a model system: Centrarchid (sunfish and bass) fishes in the Sacramento River Delta. They are generously provided with preliminary data about the biology of fishes, and then additionally can derive information from samples of Delta sunfish they dissect in the laboratory. So with their own curiosity as a driving force they derive hypotheses about future observations they can make dissecting these fishes."

"Some inquires are deceptively simple," he said. "For example, it may be that the literature indicates that a particular species of sunfish prefers to reside in submerged aquatic vegetation. One might predict that their prey does as well. A curious student can test this idea by comparing stomach contents of this species with samples of insect prey sampled from aquatic plants in the Delta."

"Simple as this project may appear to be," he said, "teams of students go through the entire process of gathering preliminary information, agreeing on a pair of mutually exclusive hypotheses that predict observations they can make from fish dissections, writing a grant proposal, gathering the data from dissections in the laboratory, data analysis, drawing conclusions, writing a paper and giving a PowerPoint presentation talk to the rest of the class on their results."

The work is done in teams, but each student writes his or her own version of the paper and gives a portion of the PowerPoint presentation.

"The hidden agendas of this course," he said, "include promoting writing and public speaking skills and learning to work in teams, three essential social skills of any good scientist."

Kimsey said new questions arise in any scientific inquiry, "not only from the results of a well thought-out test of an idea, but from the process of inquiry itself. Thus the scientific method perpetually exposes our ignorance of the world around us stimulating new ideas and questions to be explored."

And how to catch fish on a sun-dappled morning along Putah Creek while their peers are holed up in lecture halls.