Site Links
ABLE 2007: University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY June 5-9. Host: Ruth Beattie
E-mail: rebeat1@uky.edu
Mini Workshop
Friday June 9
Elder, Brad
Investigating Science
It is strange that so many science students do not know what science is. They
can often regurgitate “science is a process of observing, formulating
a hypothesis, etc.” but they are unable to compare and contrast the concepts
of a scientific fact, theory or law. The students’ paradigm nearly
always falls apart when they are asked to square their ideas of facts, theories
and laws with the statement “not yet proven false.” I recently
began questioning professional scientists about these concepts and was alarmed
to discover that they too did not have a firm grasp of these ideas or worse. In
this workshop participants will determine what is in a box without opening
the box. They will do this by designing experiments and testing their
hypothesis against controls. Once participants have come to a conclusion
for themselves, they then test each others ideas and reject them or fail to
reject them. At the end of the lab, students make a statement about what
is in the box. Because the students never learn what is in the box for
certain, they are stuck with the statement “Based on all of our experiments,
we think the object is X.” For the rest of their college days I
can ask them “yes, but what was in the box?” when we are having
a discussion about scientific facts. Not only do they remember what was
in the box, but they understand the statement “not yet proven false.”