As former elementary science and math education professor, I was always encouraging preservice teachers to teach science and math from a hands-on, minds-on perspective.
My goal was single minded in the sense that for students to learn science and math their curiosity must peaked.
This was always a challenge because most of these preservice teachers learned science and math by rote memorization of facts. Their prior knowledge and experience had few opportunities to actually investigate science phenomena and truly understand the usefulness of math.
"At Google, the only thing we love as much as science is science education. We want to celebrate young scientific talent and engage students who might not yet be engaged with science. So, in partnership with CERN, the LEGO Group, National Geographic, and Scientific American we've created an exciting new global science competition, the Google Science Fair. Students all over the world who are between the ages of 13 and 18 are eligible to enter this competition and compete for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences, internships and scholarships. "
The Scientific Method, as taught in schools, is a false process and a oversimplification of the way scientists actually work, along with missing the point of how to conduct scientific investigations.
A real understanding of the Nature of Science comes from student personal experience, using simple problem-solving processes that can be discussed and analyzed.
Using the Nature of Science as process for investigating problems helps eliminate many common misconceptions students have about science facts.
Why use experiments in teaching economics[edit]
They help students to understand an otherwise abstract model. In the double auction experiment they experience, for example, how demand and supply drive the market towards equilibrium. It's learning by doing.To show that economic theory works (for instance, in a Bertrand game). This is important because students or the general public are often too sceptical about the use of mathematical analysis in economics.To show that economic theory does not work (for instance, in an ultimatum game). This quickly leads to questions on the current frontier of our science.An experiment can make it easier for students to grasp a threshold concept like Nash equilibrium.
lesson plans for experiments (not virtual) to teach: flotation, hover craft, capillary action, air pressure, making gas, chemical reaction, light refraction, light spectrum, gravity, inertia. Probably 4th grade and above
Sample discrepant events are used to cause contradictions in students' prior knowledge and experiences in support of their better understanding of science concepts.
The importance of experimental design in science is that helps students infer about causes or relationships, as opposed to simply describe what happened in a canned experiment. As students learn to develop their own experimental design they must be able to answer the most important question of all regarding the design process.
Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times we list below 10 winners of this polling and accompany the short explanations of the physical experiments with computer animations.
Students' interest in learning science is sometimes based on inquiry into facts that others do not know or learning facts they have no prior knowledge or experiences.
Students conduct an experiment to determine the ability of rocks to absorb and retain water, making connections with the concepts of porosity and permeability in rocks.