I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn’t explain to me why I did get the results I did.
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
Teachers absolutely should not incentivize students to do things that would send them to Science Hell.
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
I think the problem did lay in the possible explanation for those results part. I couldn’t think of a possible reason for getting those results. I listed a bunch of reasons I could think of. I didn’t believe in them. The teacher didn’t gave me any reasons that I missed and just noted that my reasons were bad.
If the real motivation would be to do science, I should have repeated the experiment to see whether my results replicate. There was no time for a repeated experiment.
Getting results that you are unable to explain is very frequent if you do real science. In university we did a group PCR experiment and for some unknown reason it didn’t work in any group. The person leading the experiment made some changes the next day when another group did the experiment and it still failed.
She eliminated possible reasons and in the end didn’t know why it failed. She was quite embarrased about it.
In real science you frequently have say: “I don’t know why the experiment I did produced the results that it did.”
In my own Quantified Self experiments I have frequently data where I have no explanation what happened.
If you really want to teach the scientific method you have to confront students with experiments where the students are allowed to trust the results of the experiment over a theory that tells the student how the experiment is supposed to end. Most of the physics/chemistry experiments are poor in that regard.
They teach cargo cult science, in which experiments that don’t validate theories as right or wrong instead it’s the other way around.
That is unfortunate. I think my teachers would have accepted something along the lines of “Here are some reasons I thought of; I don’t think any of these reasons are very good, though, so I actually don’t know what happened.”
Maybe a teacher could introduce an experiment where the students have been taught a “lies-to-children” model that doesn’t quite work in the experiment, then have them do the experiment, and then after some agony on the students’ part, explain that the results were because the model is actually wrong and now they need to learn a newer one. As a sort of live-action science retelling. Still a little bit cargo-culty because there is still an answer at the end of the tunnel, but might give them a better idea of how things are supposed to work.
That’s terrible. In all of the labs I had in high school, our teachers specifically assured us we wouldn’t get worse grades for getting unexpected results, as long as we documented everything well and provided some possible explanations for those results.
Teachers absolutely should not incentivize students to do things that would send them to Science Hell.
I think the problem did lay in the possible explanation for those results part. I couldn’t think of a possible reason for getting those results. I listed a bunch of reasons I could think of. I didn’t believe in them. The teacher didn’t gave me any reasons that I missed and just noted that my reasons were bad.
If the real motivation would be to do science, I should have repeated the experiment to see whether my results replicate. There was no time for a repeated experiment.
Getting results that you are unable to explain is very frequent if you do real science. In university we did a group PCR experiment and for some unknown reason it didn’t work in any group. The person leading the experiment made some changes the next day when another group did the experiment and it still failed. She eliminated possible reasons and in the end didn’t know why it failed. She was quite embarrased about it.
In real science you frequently have say: “I don’t know why the experiment I did produced the results that it did.” In my own Quantified Self experiments I have frequently data where I have no explanation what happened.
If you really want to teach the scientific method you have to confront students with experiments where the students are allowed to trust the results of the experiment over a theory that tells the student how the experiment is supposed to end. Most of the physics/chemistry experiments are poor in that regard.
They teach cargo cult science, in which experiments that don’t validate theories as right or wrong instead it’s the other way around.
That is unfortunate. I think my teachers would have accepted something along the lines of “Here are some reasons I thought of; I don’t think any of these reasons are very good, though, so I actually don’t know what happened.”
Maybe a teacher could introduce an experiment where the students have been taught a “lies-to-children” model that doesn’t quite work in the experiment, then have them do the experiment, and then after some agony on the students’ part, explain that the results were because the model is actually wrong and now they need to learn a newer one. As a sort of live-action science retelling. Still a little bit cargo-culty because there is still an answer at the end of the tunnel, but might give them a better idea of how things are supposed to work.