The following article is a part of our Signature Pedagogies in the K-12 Classroom series. “Signature pedagogies,” as defined by Schulman in 2005, are “the types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions” and they include three critical aspects: how to think, perform, and act with integrity in the profession. Click here for a primer on the importance of signature pedagogies. 

What is Science?

Science is a fascinating subject because it’s a discipline built specifically to grapple with the question of how we know what we think we know and to update our understanding of the world as more information is learned. Moreover, the discipline of science is built to be a process to find, evaluate, and synthesize a body of knowledge, rather than to be a compendium of knowledge to be memorized (hereinafter known as a compendium course).

In other words, the purpose of the discipline of science is to give a process for drawing conclusions about our world based upon rigorously tested and verified data.

There are several benefits to a discipline built to be a process for learning, rather than a compendium of information, such as:

• It is inherently engaging for most students because it encourages curiosity, questioning, and hands-on discoveries.
• It teaches how to think on a higher level through the processes of questioning, testing, drawing conclusions, and synthesizing information.
• It acknowledges that the world and our understanding of it can and should change based on verified, rigorous new data.

There are, however, drawbacks to such a discipline. They include:

• A misunderstanding that scientists are not “experts” because they change their minds as new information becomes available. 
• The misconception that all data are equal, rather than understanding that there is a process to testing and verifying data.

Both drawbacks can be exacerbated when science is taught as a compendium course rather than as a process for drawing conclusions based upon rigorously tested and verified data. Understanding science as a process is crucial for teachers to help develop scientifically-literate young people.

What Type of Curriculum is Science?

Most science courses are taught in a topical manner, which may be the reason some educators think it’s meant to be taught as a compendium course. Rather, these topics are the lenses through which the process of science should be learned. There can be no teaching of science without the doing of science—i.e., actually using the process of science to ask questions, design investigations, draw conclusions, and verify and evaluate claims.

For instance, consider these two Next Generation Science Standards for Grade 3:

• 3-PD2-3: Ask questions to determine cause and effect relationships of electric or magnetic interactions between two objects not in contact with each other.
• 3-ESS2.2: Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.

While there are of course some content and skill connections between these two topics, a student entirely misses the unit on Magnets can still do well in a unit on World Climates. Compare this to a student who entirely misses a math unit on Addition with Two-Digit Numbers—this student will invariably have to be caught up before learning about Addition with Regrouping. This is because math is a building blocks curriculum; a student must master one set of skills before moving on to another.

That being said, some science courses or content may bleed into the area of a building blocks curriculum. This is especially true for any science content in which there is an emphasis on mathematics. Two examples are chemistry and physics. For instance, a student cannot understand how to “develop a model to illustrate how the release or absorption of energy from a chemical reaction depends upon the changes in total energy” until the student first understands how to determine chemical properties of individual elements.

What are Essential Science Signature Pedagogies?

As with all articles in this series, it’s important to remember that these pedagogies, while based on extant research and experience, are not an exhaustive list of everything that can and should happen in a science classroom. We use the term “essential” because these pedagogical methods of instruction are foundational to the definition and purpose of “science” as a discipline.

As a reminder, there are three critical elements of any signature pedagogy: how to think, how to perform, and how to act with integrity in the discipline/profession. Each of the following Essential Signature Pedagogies helps students develop one or more of these critical elements.

Science Essential Signature Pedagogy #1: The Scientific Method

There’s a reason that students do a science fair project almost every year, and these projects are standardized across almost every grade level. The Scientific Method is a precise yet flexible way to ask questions, develop predictions, test variables, collect and analyze data, and determine potential causes and effects. The scientific method very much teaches students how to think scientifically by developing testable questions and making predictions/hypotheses, determining what would constitute a “fair” test, and attempting to analyze data in an unbiased manner in order to draw conclusions.

It’s important to note that the scientific method is also flexible based on the type of question being asked. I have sometimes seen teachers get too dogmatically hung up on the individual elements of the scientific method-–for instance, requiring that hypotheses are always stated in an “if _____, then _____” fashion, or requiring that all scientific investigations have a control. (Sometimes there is no practical or ethical way to have a control group, and to force a control group would fundamentally alter the nature of the original question.)

If an observer goes into a science classroom and only ever sees students taking notes, using flashcards, and completing lower-level worksheets, it’s a good bet that they are learning science facts, rather than actually doing science. When we do not teach the actual process of science, we especially harm students who have no other avenue to experiencing STEM fields.

The teaching of the scientific method is also crucial for students to learn how to act with integrity in science. The scientific method teaches that conclusions must be based upon rigorous, verifiable data. Many students dislike being wrong, and experience with incorrect hypotheses helps them overcome this fear—which is a crucial part of critical thinking. It also helps students become scientifically literate by understanding that the nature of science is to constantly re-evaluate conclusions as new information becomes available.

Science Essential Pedagogy #2: (Levels of) Inquiry-Based Learning

The Scientific Method is one way to implement inquiry learning in the classroom. Hattie (2009) defined inquiry-based teaching or learning as involving students “in the process of observing, posting questions, engaging in experimentation or exploration, and learning to analyze and reason” (p. 208). Inquiry-based learning can, but does not have to, use the Scientific Method.

Some teachers shy away from using inquiry-based learning in the classroom because it can be difficult for students if they are used to direct instruction designed to have them memorize information to regurgitate on a test. This is especially an issue in this age of standardized testing. For that reason, understanding how to implement the Levels of Inquiry can be helpful.

According to Banchi and Bell (2008), there are four levels of inquiry that teachers can use to scaffold inquiry instruction. Banchi and Bell (2008) explained that “most students, regardless of age, need extensive practice to develop their inquiry abilities and understandings to a point where they can conduct their own investigation from start to finish” (p. 26). Starting at Level 1 and proceeding through each level can help students develop the skills to fully conduct an inquiry project on their own.

1. The first level is Confirmation Inquiry, in which the teacher provides the students with the question, the procedure, and the solution—students replicate the given process to confirm whether they get the same solution. This is a great entry point for students to learn the scientific method.
2. The next level is Structured Inquiry, in which the teacher provides the question and the procedure, and then students implement the procedure and provide their own solution.
3. In Guided Inquiry, the teacher now only provides the students with the question, and students must devise their own procedure and then implement it to determine the solution.
4. In the highest level of inquiry, Open Inquiry, students devise their own investigation from start to finish, including the question, procedure, and solution.

A great way to ensure inquiry-based learning in the science classroom is to have teachers use the 5-E Lesson Plan structure (there’s even a 7-E plan now). The 5-E Lesson plan focuses on students exploring and making meaning of concepts with the teacher as a facilitator (Georges, 2022). These steps include:

1. Engage: The teacher poses a question or scenario to activate background knowledge and intrigue students.
2. Explore: Students explore the question or scenario through research, investigation, or other activities.
3. Explain: Students develop explanations regarding what they have learned during their Explore phase; the teacher may add explanations or clear up misconceptions.
4. Elaborate: Using their newfound knowledge, students complete activities to take their learning even further.
5. Evaluate: Students evaluate their own learning.

Science Essential Pedagogy #3: Hands-on, Authentic Activities

While we should see the scientific method and inquiry learning frequently in science classrooms, we may not see them every day. Labs that use the full-blown scientific method can especially be time-consuming to set up and complete. That does not mean, however, that students cannot still participate in hands-on activities that help them understand scientific concepts.

There are two key pieces to the idea of hands-on, authentic science activities: 1) students are the ones actually doing the activities, and 2) the activities mirror real-life tasks of scientists. (Note that these tasks may be simplified or scaled down based upon the developmental readiness of students.)

As to the first caveat, frequently we may see teachers do a demonstration and call it “hands-on” learning. The students, however, are not actually handling the materials. Of course there are times in which it is not appropriate for students to handle materials, and this is not to say that demonstrations cannot be useful. The idea, however, is that as often as feasible and safe, we should see students engaged in the activities, rather than watching teachers complete them.

The second caveat is that these hands-on activities should be an authentic reflection of tasks scientists do. For instance, I remember teaching my students about the layers of soil by having them create “edible” soil with chocolate chunks to represent the bedrock, chocolate pudding to represent subsoil, crushed chocolate cookies to represent the topsoil, and a gummy worm on top. This activity was delicious, but was not authentic “science.” In fact, despite teaching this lesson to my students, I had to go look up the layers of soil just now—clearly the lesson did not even teach me about the layers of soil. What if I had, instead, taken my students outside and dug into the ground to show them the layers of soil, and had students complete an experiment to plant seeds in the various layers and see in which layer plants grew best? Now that would have been science.

A quick word about device-based simulations and whether they count as “hands-on.” The answer is: kind of. Basically, computer-based simulations are not a substitute for the real thing-–unless the real thing is not safe or feasible for the classroom. For instance, students will learn far more about circuits by actually building a circuit with batteries and wires than they will by completing the same simulation on a 2-dimensional computer screen. We may, however, use a simulation to explore the impact of hurricanes on ecosystems, as that would be very difficult (and dangerous!) to recreate in a classroom.

Science Pedagogy #4: Collecting, Analyzing, Verifying, and Communicating Data

Although collecting and using data is a part of the scientific method, it is so integral to the fundamental nature of science that it deserves to be done even when the entire scientific method is not used.

Firstly, without strong data, we risk drawing conclusions based upon beliefs. History is riddled with examples of inaccurate science, such as the stubborn adherence to belief that the sun revolved around the Earth despite new data, that the body was run by four humours, or that women became hysterical as a result of the uterus wandering around the body. We have even seen modern examples, such as Andrew Wakefield’s claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, which was later proven to be based upon falsified data, but has ushered in a resurgence of the almost-eliminated measles, mumps, and rubella diseases. Conclusions based on belief rather than rigorous, verifiable data can have drastic consequences.

Even scientists who act with integrity when collecting data can make mistakes. For instance, a study in the journal Genome Biology found that as many as 1 out of every 5 studies on genetics contains errors simply due to data formatting issues in Microsoft Excel (Ziemann et al., 2016). A study on national debt by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) was cited over and over by countries cutting social welfare programs to bring down spending-–despite the fact that the researchers accidentally omitted 5 rows of data that would have fundamentally changed their calculations.

No one is quite sure how widespread issues with data are in scientific studies (worries about the replication crisis suggest these issues might be more prevalent than we realize), but it cannot be denied that we need to explicitly teach students not just how to accurately collect strong data to answer scientific questions, but how to analyze it, verify it, and communicate it to others—who should then, in turn, also verify it. Understanding and verifying data can literally save lives.

In Summary

As a science educator, or observer of one, do we expect to see these signature pedagogies in every science class every day? Of course not. But should we see them more frequently than we see other instructional methodologies? We would certainly hope so. I will never forget the time that I received feedback on a science unit that I wrote in which it was deemed “too fun;” I was told that “the students are going to think science is about doing labs all the time.” My response was, “Yes! Exactly!” Of course there are times for research, times for learning to be fluent with basic information, and time for studying. But if we truly want to give all our students a chance at being successful in STEM fields, we need to ensure that students are doing science every day, not just memorizing facts discovered by other people.

References

5E Resources (n.d). National Science Teaching Association. https://www.nsta.org/topics/5e

Astronomy Staff (2017, April). When did we realize that the Earth orbits the Sun? Astronomy. https://www.astronomy.com/science/when-did-we-realize-that-the-earth-orbits-the-sun/

Banchi, H., & Bell, R. (2008). The many levels of inquiry. Science and Children, 26-29. https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/The-Many-Levels-of-Inquiry-NSTA-article.pdf

Davey, R. (2022). What is the replication crisis? News Medical. https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-the-Replication-Crisis.aspx

Gerges, E. (2022, March 4). How to use the 5-E model in your science classroom: An inquiry-focused method gives students a way to connect scientific ideas to their experiences and apply their learning. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-use-5e-model-your-science-classroom/

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Humoral Theory (n.d). Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics (CURIOSity Collections). Harvard Library. https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/feature/humoral-theory

Kapsalis, T. (2017, April). Hysteria, witches, and the wandering uterus: A brief history. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/hysteria-witches-and-the-wandering-uterus-a-brief-history/

Rudy, L.J. (2024, August). Andrew Wakefield’s theories about MMR vaccines and autism: Potent force in autism world. verywellhealth. https://www.verywellhealth.com/who-is-andrew-wakefield-260623#citation-4

The Excel formula error that initiated austerity policies after the crisis (2022, November). Power-User: The Right Tool for the Right Job. https://www.powerusersoftwares.com/post/2016/08/11/the-excel-formula-error-that-initiated-austerity-policies-after-the-crisis

Ziemann, M., Eren, Y., El-Osta, A. (2016). Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. Genome Biology, 17, 177. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7

About the Author

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Chief Creative Officer at eObservations and DCD Consulting. She has worked as: an elementary school teacher; an instructional coach; a Director of Innovation and Professional Learning; and a Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. She can be reached at kate@eobservations.com, kate.maxlow@gmail.com, or at https://bit.ly/kmaxlow.