Science Education - Learning from New Directions in Practice

I first off would also have to agree with PBurgmayer’s suggestion of a lab equipment demo as a prerequisite to actual science experimentation. This would be a great activity to incorporate into an ideal introduction to all Science courses, to all realistic science-doing.

Next, I must commend PBurgmayer for bringing to light “the basic scientific idea of verifiability by asking, “How will you know when you are done?” in his classroom. This is a great question to pose to students in order to generate real scientific inquiry because I do feel it is one of “the hardest concept for students” to understand. For not only does this question function in deconstructing the misconception of science and all scientific experimentation from being open-and-shut cases, it allows for the revisit of the same story and potentially getting something else out of its continued/re-exploration.

Thinking about Burgmayers question more, when should you (the scientist, not the cookbook reader) or the teacher come to the decision that your experiment is over? If all stories are open to revising, augmentation, then when should one stop an experiment? To what extent should your lab abide by the “hypothesis” posed if something else equally, if not more, interesting arises that is worth exploring? I think one way to answer these questions, and many questions like these has to do with the amount time allotted, because time is always an issue.

When the goal is to have “student(s) experience an authentic quantitative inquiry lab,” a teacher should not have to worry so much about the instances when a student(s) strays away from what they “should” learn/perform, the “cracks” in a lab experiment or otherwise. Granted, allowing the students so much freedom is only worthwhile if the teacher is capable of guiding them to an interesting if not useful discovery, the (hopefully only relatively few) students that “crack” should be allowed to "crack" in the hopes that they will learn something different and still learn what they "should be learning by the end of the lesson" from those who didn’t crack.

To project this idea on PBurgmayer’s story as an example, the teacher could have allowed students like T&S to learn the main concept meant for the lab (ideally) from the well executed and establish lab and lab report from their classmates. That way, not only will T&S have explored in everyway they possibly can, they will also get the fundamental take home message by the end of the day. This kind of idea, in which a lot of focus is placed on the student’s final results and therefore its presentation, reminds me a lot of the labs I had in my intro to BIO course earlier last year. At the end of each lab, each group is “put to the test” and meant to present their findings with a compelling story accounting for the conclusions drawn to the rest of the class, persuading the other members of the class of the conclusion we were able to get to. I thought it was effective and a closer attempt at experiencing an "authentic quantitative inquiry lab" even if my group did not get the anticipated results.