Experiments - more than just Edu-Play

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All science teachers want their students to see the science and the elegance of how the experiment show the science in the experiments done in class.  Not all students see experiment time as an opportunity for learning.  A colleague just tweeted this and it made me think "What DO I do?" and "What should I do?"

An internal conversation I do have is...
  • Is this experiment to show a scientific theory? - If yes, then it better blimmin' work every time. I don't want any odd results and I don't want to have to say "Oh - you should have seen …". If this happens, I have lost them and all sorts of misconceptions get reinforced, or created or worse, they might think science is stupid!
    • Will the students see what I need them to see if they do the experiment? Or would it be better to do a Demo or even use an Animation or Video
  • Is this experiment to show the process of doing a scientific investigation? - If yes, then it is better to get some unusual answers, then I can have conversations about reliability or variables, or comparisons.
  • I never do both these bullet points in the same experiment. - To me, they seem mutually exclusive for the age and cognitive development of the students I teach (high school aged)
The second bullet point is easy to go with, it involves the teacher asking a bunch of open and dialogic questions during the activity to get students thinking.

The first bullet point is really the sticky one - let's talk about that more

How do I get the students to link the experiment to the scientific theory? 

I think of it this way... The experiment is a model of the scientific theory or scientific idea and so if I sit it within the Nature of Science: Communicating in Science rather than in the Investigating in Science sub-strand, it causes me to treat the learning experience in a different way.

  1. Teach the scientific theory or idea
  2. Introduce the experiment as a model of the theory
  3. Get the students to use their new knowledge of the theory and their existing knowledge and understandings of the natural world to predict their observations 
  4. Do the experiment. As I move around groups, I talk about the observations they made. I really encourage them to look closely. I might need to encourage them to do the experiment again if one team saw something another team didn't. I really encourage them to dig into the model (experiment)
  5. In discussion at the end I might ask questions like:
    1. How did this experiment represent the scientific theory we have been looking at?
    2. What observations did you notice that were representative of this theory?
    3. How did this experiment NOT represent the scientific theory we have been looking at?
    4. What questions do you have about this model or this theory?
    5. How can we design an investigation that helps answer those questions?
  6. How can we design a new model that does represents the missing parts of the theory we couldn't observe with this experiment? 
  7. I have a different representation of this theory for us to look into - let's see which parts of this theory it shows....


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