Exploding baking-soda volcanoes. Dissecting frogs. Bending the flow
of water from a faucet with a recently used comb. These are the types of
activities that probably come to mind when kids — even at the high
school level — think of scientific research.
Although such experiments
are educational and sometimes even investigative, they aren’t research.
That’s because they all have predetermined outcomes. Instead, such
demonstrations are really meant to help visualize scientific concepts.
However,
“That’s not what scientists do. They’re looking for something new,”
science teacher Bill Wallace of the Georgetown Day School in Washington,
D.C., explained at the 2012 Fellows Institute in August.
Allowing
kids to ask questions, study background information on a problem and
then test their own predictions reveals the true nature of scientific
inquiry. Along the way, tweens and teens will learn that biology,
chemistry, physics and earth science are not static bodies of knowledge,
but enterprises that churn out new discoveries every day.
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