Please show me which one describes this "primary school scientific method."
I'll do you one better. I'll give you descriptions/criticisms from the literature rather than one of my blogs:
“Around the middle of the 20th century, the Scientific Method was offered as a template for teachers to emulate for the activity of scientists (National Society for the Study of Education, 1947). It was composed of anywhere from five to seven steps (e.g., making observations, defining the problem, constructing hypotheses, experimenting, compiling results, drawing conclusions). Despite criticism beginning as early as the 1960s, this oversimplified view of science has proven disconcertingly durable and continues to be used in classroom today”
Windschitl, M. (2004). Folk theories of “inquiry:” How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific method.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching,
41(5), 481-512.
“One of the most widely held misconceptions about science is the existence of the scientific method. The modern origins of this misconception may be traced to Francis Bacon’s
Novum Organum (1620/1996), in which the inductive method was propounded to guarantee ‘‘certain’’ knowledge. Since the 17th century, inductivism and
several other epistemological stances that aimed to achieve the same end (although in those latter stances the criterion of certainty was either replaced with notions of high probability or abandoned altogether)
have been debunked, such as Bayesianism,
falsificationism, and hypothetico-deductivism (Gillies, 1993).
Nonetheless, some of those stances, especially inductivism and falsificationism, are still widely popularized in science textbooks and even explicitly taught in classrooms. The myth of the scientific method is regularly manifested in the belief that there is a recipelike stepwise procedure that all scientists follow when they do science. This notion was explicitly debunked: There is no single scientific method that would guarantee the development of infallible knowledge (AAAS, 1993; Bauer, 1994; Feyerabend, 1993; NRC, 1996; Shapin, 1996).” (emphases added)
Lederman, N. G., Abd-El-Khalick, F., Bell, R. L., & Schwartz, R. (2002). Views of nature of science questionnaire: Toward valid and meaningful assessment of learners’ nature of science
. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39, 497–521.
"The model of ‘scientific method’ that probably reflects many people’s understanding is one of scientific knowledge being ‘proved’ through experiments...That is, the ‘experimental method’ offers a way of uncovering true knowledge of the world, providing that we plan our experiments logically, and carefully collect sufficient data. In this way, our rational faculty is applied to empirical evidence to prove (or otherwise) scientific hypotheses.
This is a gross simplification, and misrepresentation, of how science actually occurs, but unfortunately it has probably been encouraged by the impoverished image of the nature of science commonly reflected in school science." (emphasis added)
Taber, K. S. (2009).
Progressing Science Education: Constructing the Scientific Research Programme into the Contingent Nature of Learning Science (
Science & Technology Education Library Vol. 37). Springer.
"a focus on practices (in the plural
) avoids the mistaken impression that there is one distinctive approach common to all science—a single “scientific method”—or that uncertainty is a universal attribute of science. In reality, practicing scientists employ a broad spectrum of methods" (emphasis added)
Schweingruber, H., Keller, T., & Quinn, H. (Eds.). (2012).
A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Committee on a Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards. National Research Council’s Board on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
There is no scientific method in the set that there is no linear sequence, no set of steps, and no procedure that accurately describes even a simplistic model of scientific inquiry. The Scientific Method as such is a myth:
“Myth of 'The Scientific Method’
This myth is often manifested in the belief that there is a recipe-like stepwise procedure that typifies all scientific practice. This notion is erroneous: there is no single ‘‘Scientific Method’’ that would guarantee the development of infallible knowledge. Scientists do observe, compare, measure, test, speculate, hypothesize, debate, create ideas and conceptual tools, and construct theories and explanations. However, there is no single sequence of (practical, conceptual, or logical) activities that will unerringly lead them to valid claims, let alone ‘‘certain’’ knowledge”
Abd‐El‐Khalick, F., Waters, M., & Le, A. P. (2008). Representations of nature of science in high school chemistry textbooks over the past four decades.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching,
45(7), 835-855.
“A key myth...is a belief in a universal scientific method. As with many myths, those who hold to it are startled when they discover its inaccuracy; those who know it is a myth are surprised by its persistence in textbooks, curricula, and lesson plans. I've seen teachers become visibly shaken when they learn the scientific method is a myth. I!ve also heard aspirants to a teacher education program say they studied the scientific method in preparation for their application interviews. Somehow the myth of the scientific method lives on and not only within the realm of the science classroom. The persisting mythology of a scientific method is viewed as a problem within educational research (Rowbottom & Aiston, 2006) as well as for those who teach science.”
Settlage, J. (2007). Demythologizing science teacher education: Conquering the false ideal of open inquiry.
Journal of Science Teacher Education,
18(4), 461-467.
What's amazing is that the criticisms of this presentation of a single method of "steps" (e.g., formulate hypothesis, develop a way to test it, try to prove it wrong, if confirmed it becomes "theory") are almost as old as the notion itself:
“Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist “than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed ‘steps’ of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in his attempt to understand natural phenomena"
Harvard Committee. (1945).
General education in a free society: Report of the Harvard Committee. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
I use the particle/wave example to show how dependent hypotheses, experiments, and the interpretations of findings are upon theory. Physicists were not aware that they were assuming that physical systems were all either particles or waves. They thought that's just how things were (and obviously so). Thus when Young showed light behaved like a wave, that should have settled the matter. Particles do not and cannot behave like waves, and there is no third option (so it was thought). It turns out that nothing is either particles or waves, that this obvious reality was a false assumption intrinsic to all theories in physics, and no test could confirm that light (or anything else) was actually composed of particles or waves.
In fact, the assumption that things are composed of particle-like elements continues to play a huge role in physics. Quantum mechanics, according to the orthodox interpretation, provides us with a statistical method for predicting experimental outcomes. Physical systems are mathematical entities that live in an abstract (often infinite dimensional) space with no known relationship to any actual "physical" system. However, QM suffers from a serious drawback: it is not relativistic. Early attempts to develop a relativistic quantum physics were hampered by the mass-energy equivalence of special relativity and the extreme oscillations & fluctuations of energy in quantum mechanics. This means that quantum processes should allow for the creation of new quantum "entities" essential
ex nihilo.
Particles in modern physics are simply quantized "units" (not necessarily of things). It is an
assumption that these units exist as point-particles in some field, and that assumption not only drives the nature of discoveries but what we say these discoveries are. We introduce "virtual" particles into equations and models to balance them, yet these particles aren't virtual (they are causally efficacious, if one is to interpret physical theory as being, well, physical). They do not exist as waves at all and cannot (the wave equation of quantum mechanics cannot allow for the creation of "new" particles and was abandoned early on as a means to get to a relativistic quantum physics; it was replaced by a new, quantum theory of fields). In the standard model of particle physics, the nonlocal, "wave"-like nature of quantum systems is replaced by the nonlocality of fields. Particles are regained by assumption and modern physics proceeds by interpreting and developing the mathematical theory in terms of this assumption. This divide is seen most clearly in certain fields of physics (such as cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, theoretical physics, etc.) in which much research goes into developing theories that are
only “testable” mathematically (e.g., inflation models in cosmology, M-theory, supersymmetry, etc.).
Are you suggesting that errors in your experimental technique cannot be found by getting other people to examine your work, or getting other people to replicate your experiments?
That is quite possible, yes. It is often the case that disagreements aren’t resolved by experiments because replication is irrelevant: there exists disagreement as to the nature and implications of the findings
even granting that the experiments can be replicated. For example, the biomedical model of mental health was created rather suddenly in the early 80s. It assumed that underlying each mental illness was a distinct pathology. Psychiatrists thought that the medical evidence would come as our understanding of brain function and physiology increased. Instead, this evidence has shown a surprising degree of similarity between very diverse diagnoses. Yet because the evidence is interpreted in terms of the assumed theory by proponents and without it by critics, experiments have little effect on the debate. There are more extreme examples (e.g., how experiments “support” pseudoscience because reproducible studies make wild assumptions about logical relations between designs, outcome, and interpretation) and less extreme, and while disagreements aren’t generally solved by reproducibility they do get hashed out as more general evidence accumulates (although not always as they should).
This is talking about social sciences. I'm talking more about hard sciences such as physics.
Where do you think the hard sciences got this paradigm? The social sciences. Time was such methods weren’t needed in harder sciences, which were most guided by physical intuition, clearer results, simpler systems, etc. This is no longer true (I challenge anybody who argues so to give me an intuitive account of quantum field theory). The logical issues with NHST don’t change because it is used in medicine, climate science, or physics vs. sociology.
