Nature of Science

These readings and the questions that are throughout them are making me so interested. Why did people/scientists do the things they did?!

After reading "People Behind the Science," my head still continued to spin. I had to read it multiple times just to make sure that I understood everything it was saying. The questions at the bottom continued to make me think. These scientists have to use their imagination and creativity to try and figure out the explanation for the "stuff" that makes everything up. Scientists have to stretch their minds to think about all the things that other scientists have been able to prove to see if they agree or if there is more to it. I think the process of science could take a very long time. There are so many different factors and things that could have gone wrong or might even have a better idea and change halfway through the process. I dont think there is one process that will end up the same as another. There is always something new that could be mistakenly stumbled over that take the whole process in a different direction. I think people who do science have got to be curious and love when they stumble across new things or ideas that weren't in the "original" plan. But I guess I dont know if all people of science would like a surprise discovery or not.

Reading "Historical Science Story" was just as interesting as the first. I find myself thinking about how over time people are trying to get to the same goal but finding newer and not exactly better ideas but different ways to be able to study the same thing that scientist and other people have looked at before. Scientists are trying to take a different approach at the same subjects to find out more about the things in the world. Hopefully piecing everything together to be able to create one big bank of knowledge about the same subject, and in this case the plants and animals. This story covered many many years like the first one, but scientists are taking information from one another to be able to come up with an explanation for why things happen the way that they do.

The last article I read was "What's in a Word?" One of thing that stuck out to me right away was where the article said "Learners should understand that scientific knowledge is developed through a variety of approaches, and not one “scientific method." When I think of science and back on my science experiences all I can remember talking a whole lot about is the scientific method. There are so many more ways to go about discovery and science that the scientific method is only a small portion. The science language that is taught in the younger years will carry on through the rest of the students science careers. If we as teachers go about it in the way suggested in the "Introducing nature-of-science
concepts and terminology" section of this article then students might think a little bit differently about how they talk and think about the nature science. I think it would be important to keep the two tables that are in this article close by to and correct yourself as a teacher if this ever happens.