August is 'silly season', so right in the middle of it, a light relief. images: the ABC of practical work Just suppose wanted a way of thinking about practical work, and you read a bit of well established, insightful psychology. And that you'd spent some decades watching children crashing on the twin canyon walls of boredom ('We'll just follow the instructions, more or less, and fix our social lives') and anxiety ('I don't know what to do next, or how to do it.') Might there be a navigable channel between these walls?
I think experiment is fundamental to science. So not teaching experiments is not teaching science. For younger students there are measurement skills they need to be taught, before going on to think about experimental design as they get older. Currently we have too many "verification" experiments in the curriculum. Students should be shown the power of experiment early on, questions asked, experiments designed to provide the outcome. These can be everyday things, they don't have to be complicated. Experiments where students follow recipes should be very limited, the scaffolding removed very quickly. For a definition of experiment see Mayo: https://errorstatistics.com/mayo-publications/ . I would suggest that currently we don't teach enough of the skills needed to allow students to do experiments.
Images, Resonances, Echoes, take 8
I think experiment is fundamental to science. So not teaching experiments is not teaching science. For younger students there are measurement skills they need to be taught, before going on to think about experimental design as they get older. Currently we have too many "verification" experiments in the curriculum. Students should be shown the power of experiment early on, questions asked, experiments designed to provide the outcome. These can be everyday things, they don't have to be complicated. Experiments where students follow recipes should be very limited, the scaffolding removed very quickly. For a definition of experiment see Mayo: https://errorstatistics.com/mayo-publications/ . I would suggest that currently we don't teach enough of the skills needed to allow students to do experiments.