What This Means for Instruction

Understanding how to think like a scientist will help students think critically and analyze information prior to making inferences. Students will become capable of evaluating complex problems and making informed decisions. This understanding is not fueled by procedural lab activities and memorization of science facts, but through careful investigation of broad, interrelated concepts under the guidance of a teacher alert to possible misconceptions. By having an awareness of the impact of society’s values on accepted hypotheses, and the necessity of incorporating ethical practices such as peer review, the publication of discoveries and verification of results by others, students can recognize the dynamic quality of scientific understandings. The authors cited here offer the following suggestions:

• Guide students in the essential skills of collecting, analyzing and organizing data and generating hypotheses. (American Association for the Advancement of Science

• Help students recognize that what is known in science is continually changing and that new theories may become accepted and/or previously held ones may be disproved as new data become available. (Driver

• Demonstrate that mistakes and incorrect hypotheses may lead to new understandings. (Carey and Smith

• Encourage students to ask questions and think critically. (Wiske; Bransford, Brown & Cocking

• Encourage students to present their own hypotheses and expose their misconceptions in a community of learners. Provide opportunities for students to compare and contrast alternative hypotheses to those accepted by the scientific community. (Driver; Halkia

• Teach students to question what seems to be evident, stressing that observations or experiments must be reproducible for results to be accepted. When incorporating history with science, explain that the popular views of society can influence which scientific ideas are accepted. (Silverman

• Teach formal experimentation only after students have a clear understanding of inferring, interpreting information, controlling variables and formulating hypotheses. (Colvill and Pattie)