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2The Scientific Method Stephen W. Lyons Preface Some students have been given the impression by their teacher that wild guessing is a part of science. I have observed middle school students at the science center in response to a question give a series of wild guesses. They would look at my eyes in an effort to detect which guess is correct. Apparently, they had been conditioned to respond to a stimulus. Because, when they saw something that indicated to them that they had guessed correctly, they would then look for an expected reward. Well, the scientific method is not about wild guessing and I really doubt if a scientist can be created using operant conditioning Sir Isaac Newton said, "I saw further than others because I raised myself onto the shoulders of giants such as Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler." Your students should understand that people such as Newton and Einstein studied and understood the intellectual giants of their day and then built upon what they had learned and corrected what was discovered wrong. If you want your students to become a scientist, they should understand what it means to 'stand on the shoulder°s of giants', to build upon what the current scientific leaders have discovered, correct their errors, to understand what it means to expand knowledge using the scientific method and publish. (This certainly does not apply to young students. They would first need to have prerequisite knowledge to understand and that, in most cases, would not happen until high school.) The Scientific Method The scientific method is simply a self-correcting process for finding answers to questions. Also, the inductive form of the scientific method can be thought of as focused child°s play.It takes two forms: deductive and inductive. Deductive method: The deductive form arrives at a conclusion by reasoning (the application of principles may substitute for testing) where the conclusion follows necessarily from a premise. It is the mental process of thought experiments and mathematical reasoning. Rene Descartes, French mathematician and philosopher, 1596-1650, reduced his method of determining the truth into four steps. He was careful to preface by stating that this was his personal method and he was not suggesting at anyone should follow his lead. His caution was likely from a concerned that he may offend those in power and thus suffer the consequences.
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