On his Computing Education Blog, Mark Guzdial wrote about Nancy Nersessian’s work on how scientists really work: The Scientific Method is wrong: Scientists don’t test hypotheses, but build models. He describes her idea as
Rather than test hypotheses, scientists do experiments to influence their models of how the world works. The hypotheses they test come out of those models, …
That is hardly a new idea. I’ve been trying to convince teachers for years that a hypothesis is not a guess, not even an educated guess, but the prediction of a model in a situation in which different models make different predictions. (See Science fair time again or Google science fair, for example).
I suppose that technically the term “hypothesis” should be used for the model, rather than for the prediction made from the model, because it comes from the Greek ὑπόθεσις (hypóthesis), meaning basis or supposition. But what gets stuck in the “hypothesis” box in science-fair forms is usually the prediction, not the model (if we should be so fortunate as to have a model rather than a wild-ass guess from the students).
Perhaps we should banish the term “hypothesis” from science fairs entirely, since it is used so badly. In its place we should ask students to provide the models that their experiment can distinguish among, and the predictions that would result from each model. By making the models (always plural!) be the center of attention, rather than the prediction, I think we could correct a lot of the misunderstandings that abound about the scientific method.