I’ve recently started as a science teaching assistant, I’m deciding on whether teaching is something I’m any good at and a career that I’d like to pursue. But in my first few weeks I have noticed something about how the students view and understand the information they are taught. There is no distinction between the way they view science and highly subjective subjects like English and RE. Student’s view someone’s opinion on why Shakespeare used a certain turn of phrase in a sonnet in the same way that they view atomic structure. To them both are equally valid, just someone’s idea. I think this stems from a lack of understanding of what science is and how it works. So in the rest of this blog I’m going to give a lay explanation of how science works. For those of you who are academics this will skirt over issues about whether peer review is the best way or that negative results are under reported and published. The idea is just to lay out that science is a systematic and self-correcting way of understanding the world.
Firstly, most science is done by conducting experiments. Researchers will get an idea from observing things in nature or from what we already know about how the world works and want to test if their idea is right. These ideas are hypotheses. This is done by changing one variable and seeing what effect this has, but also comparing it to when nothing is changed (called a control). This allows the scientists to see the impact this variable, be is temperature in a reaction or how much food a father blue tit has available to feed his offspring, has on the system. The researchers the record their results and write them up in a scientific paper, usually structured: abstract (summary), introduction (why we’re looking at this and what similar things have been found before), methods (how we ran our experiment), results (what we found) and discussion (how we interpret what we’ve found).
Secondly, the scientists will submit their research to an academic journal in the hope it gets published. There work will be sent off to experts in their field of research, be it astrophysics, marine biology or material science. These experts will then look at how the experiment was done: was it a careful and well-designed experiment? Did they use a big enough sample size? Did they use the right statistics to determine if what they found was statistically significant? They will also look at the discussion to see if the researchers interpreted their findings correct or if they are claiming to have found things that their results do not support. This process determines if this bit of research becomes published or not. These are the types of science that you hear about in newspapers and on the TV. This is cutting edge research and you’ll learn about it at university but not in school.
Thirdly, cutting edge research is great and it is the stuff that breaks new ground but it isn’t always correct. To really know if something that has been found is real it needs to be repeated by other researchers. This is where science differs from other subjects. Experiments are repeated by other researchers and published and their results are compared to those of the first. Gradually knowledge about something builds up and something called a meta-analysis can be done. This involves looking at all of the research in a specific area and finding out what it all means, because comparing a large amount of studies is more accurate than just using one to decide if a scientific hypothesis is true. Often initially exciting and extreme finding are tempered, or they can be found to be untrue and in this was science is self-correcting. However, if all the repeated experiments show the initial idea to be true then it will change from a hypothesis to a theory. Theory is a term that is often misunderstood outside of science because it sounds like it’s just an idea but a scientific theory is a In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses [1]. Theories are the end point of science not the beginning.
Fourthly, and finally, these new areas of science are taught in schools. This can take a long time and typically depend on what the government in your country decides is important. But before it gets to the school text book science has been rigorously tested and shown to be repeatable and true in a way that someone’s opinion on why a certain ruler in the 19th century decided to do x or y just simply haven’t. I am not advocating for C.P. Snow’s two cultures or trying to devalue arts subjects, as they are crucial to education and provide a form of thinking that is critical to learn. I also believe that children should be taught to have a critical mind and ask questions of everything they are taught. However, when students are taught evolution by natural selection or atomic theory they shouldn’t be do I believe this, as they should of a literary critic’s opinion of Wordsworth, but instead how did scientists find this out and what is the evidence? They are subtly different but crucially different questions. There is also beauty in the scientific method!
Firstly, most science is done by conducting experiments. Researchers will get an idea from observing things in nature or from what we already know about how the world works and want to test if their idea is right. These ideas are hypotheses. This is done by changing one variable and seeing what effect this has, but also comparing it to when nothing is changed (called a control). This allows the scientists to see the impact this variable, be is temperature in a reaction or how much food a father blue tit has available to feed his offspring, has on the system. The researchers the record their results and write them up in a scientific paper, usually structured: abstract (summary), introduction (why we’re looking at this and what similar things have been found before), methods (how we ran our experiment), results (what we found) and discussion (how we interpret what we’ve found).
Secondly, the scientists will submit their research to an academic journal in the hope it gets published. There work will be sent off to experts in their field of research, be it astrophysics, marine biology or material science. These experts will then look at how the experiment was done: was it a careful and well-designed experiment? Did they use a big enough sample size? Did they use the right statistics to determine if what they found was statistically significant? They will also look at the discussion to see if the researchers interpreted their findings correct or if they are claiming to have found things that their results do not support. This process determines if this bit of research becomes published or not. These are the types of science that you hear about in newspapers and on the TV. This is cutting edge research and you’ll learn about it at university but not in school.
Thirdly, cutting edge research is great and it is the stuff that breaks new ground but it isn’t always correct. To really know if something that has been found is real it needs to be repeated by other researchers. This is where science differs from other subjects. Experiments are repeated by other researchers and published and their results are compared to those of the first. Gradually knowledge about something builds up and something called a meta-analysis can be done. This involves looking at all of the research in a specific area and finding out what it all means, because comparing a large amount of studies is more accurate than just using one to decide if a scientific hypothesis is true. Often initially exciting and extreme finding are tempered, or they can be found to be untrue and in this was science is self-correcting. However, if all the repeated experiments show the initial idea to be true then it will change from a hypothesis to a theory. Theory is a term that is often misunderstood outside of science because it sounds like it’s just an idea but a scientific theory is a In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses [1]. Theories are the end point of science not the beginning.
Fourthly, and finally, these new areas of science are taught in schools. This can take a long time and typically depend on what the government in your country decides is important. But before it gets to the school text book science has been rigorously tested and shown to be repeatable and true in a way that someone’s opinion on why a certain ruler in the 19th century decided to do x or y just simply haven’t. I am not advocating for C.P. Snow’s two cultures or trying to devalue arts subjects, as they are crucial to education and provide a form of thinking that is critical to learn. I also believe that children should be taught to have a critical mind and ask questions of everything they are taught. However, when students are taught evolution by natural selection or atomic theory they shouldn’t be do I believe this, as they should of a literary critic’s opinion of Wordsworth, but instead how did scientists find this out and what is the evidence? They are subtly different but crucially different questions. There is also beauty in the scientific method!
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