A while back we invited you to ask us anything. Here are our answers to Aaron Mietzner’s question: how would you teach the scientific method to middle school students?
Jeremy’s answer: I know nothing about teaching middle school, so I’m just going to point to my buddy Greg Crowther’s old post for us on teaching the scientific method to high school students and hope that it generalizes to middle school.
Brian’s answer: I guess I would say the question is a little bit leading. A more basic question is “what should we teach middle schoolers about how science works?” I personally disagree a bit with Greg in that: a) I don’t think scientists follow the classic 4 step scientific method, and b) I don’t think it is what makes science powerful. We don’t have a recipe. We have a toolkit and a mindset. What I would teach middle-schoolers about science are:
- We have ideas that can be tested by data in the real world. An idea that can never be tested is unscientific.
- Scientists challenge and test each others ideas. This usually causes us to be as rigorous as possible with our own ideas before we present them publicly. But when our ideas are proven wrong we accept it and move in new directions.
- Science is a contest of ideas. We compare and contrast different ideas, explanations and approaches to each other all the time. And the better ideas accumulate more evidence in support and eventually win. Any idea currently believed by scientists has stood up against tough competition.
- We quantify things. This makes it much more likely that we can prove something wrong than if we use vague verbal, qualitative models and test them verbally.
- We use experimental and observational methods to pin-point what is going on (i.e. we use controlled experiments and we include covariates like productivity or patient age in observational data).
- We learn from past scientists and build on their ideas so we don’t just make things up – we build our knowledge up carefully.
- We use formal methods from statistics to quantify the types of variation and measurement errors in our systems.
Personally I would much prefer middle schoolers learn that scientists do those things and practice how they can do these things themselves rather than learn some cook book recipe about how to do science.
And beyond that, data literacy. Let me repeat that: data literacy. I would much rather middle school science teachers produce students who know how to read a scatter plot with a regression line, a trend line over time, or paired bar charts with controls and treatments. I am continually blown away how poor the data literacy is in university freshman.