SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING PRACTICES
Principal Goals of Science Education
Develop students' capability to engage in scientific inquiry.
Cultivate students’ scientific habits of mind.
Teach students how to reason in a scientific
context.
The Nuts and Bolts of the Practices
Why Are the Practices Important?
Understanding How Scientists Work
Participation in these practices helps students form an understanding of the crosscutting concepts and disciplinary ideas of science and engineering.
The practices help make students’ knowledge more meaningful and embeds it more deeply into their worldview.
Engaging in the practices of science helps students understand how scientific knowledge develops.
Understanding how scientists utilize the practices shows that theory development, reasoning, and testing are components of a larger ensemble of activities.
Understanding how scientists actually work, helps students develop a deeper understanding of the concepts and purposes of science rather than just knowledge about a set of procedures or the misconception that there is a single “scientific method”.
Utilizing actual scientific practices, such as modeling, developing explanations, and engaging in critique and evaluation (argumentation) helps students understand science on a deeper level.
What Are the Practices?
Asking questions and defining problems.
Developing and using models.
Planning and carrying out investigations.
Analyzing and interpreting data.
Using mathematics and computational thinking.
Constructing explanations and designing solutions.
Engaging in argument from evidence .
The study of science and engineering should produce a sense of the process of argument necessary for advancing and defending a new idea or an explanation of a phenomenon and the norms for conducting such arguments. In that spirit, students should argue for the explanations they construct, defend their interpretations of the associated data, and advocate for the designs they propose.
Students at any grade level should be able to ask questions of each other about the texts they read, the features of the phenomena they observe, and the conclusions they draw from their models or scientific investigations. For engineering, they should ask questions to define the problem to be solved and to elicit ideas that lead to the constraints and specifications for its solution.
Students should have opportunities to plan and carry out several different kinds of investigations during their K-12 years. At all levels, they should engage in investigations that range from those structured by the teacher—in order to expose an issue or question that they would be unlikely to explore on their own (e.g., measuring specific properties of materials)— to those that emerge from students’ own questions.
Once collected, data must be presented in a form that can reveal any patterns and relationships and that allows results to be communicated to others. Because raw data as such have little meaning, a major practice of scientists is to organize and interpret data through tabulating, graphing, or statistical analysis. Such analysis can bring out the meaning of data—and their relevance—so that they may be used as evidence.
Although there are differences in how mathematics and computational thinking are applied in science and in engineering, mathematics often brings these two fields together by enabling engineers to apply the mathematical form of scientific theories and by enabling scientists to use powerful information technologies designed by engineers. Both kinds of professionals can thereby accomplish investigations and analyses and build complex models, which might otherwise be out of the question.
IN SCIENCE:
The goal of science is the construction of theories that provide explanatory accounts of the world. A theory becomes accepted when it has multiple lines of empirical evidence and greater explanatory power of phenomena than previous theories.
IN ENGINEERING:
The goal is a design rather than an explanation. The process of developing a design is iterative and systematic, as is the process of developing an explanation or a theory in science. Engineers’ activities, however, have elements that are distinct from those of scientists. These elements include specifying constraints and criteria for desired qualities of the solution, developing a design plan, producing and testing models or prototypes, selecting among alternative design features to optimize the achievement of design criteria, and refining design ideas based on the performance of a prototype or simulation.
Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information
Any education in science and engineering needs to develop students’ ability to read and produce domain-specific text. As such, every science or engineering lesson is in part a language lesson, particularly reading and producing the genres of texts that are intrinsic to science and engineering.
Modeling can begin in the earliest grades, with students’ models progressing from concrete “pictures” and/or physical scale models (e.g., a toy car) to more abstract representations of relevant relationships in later grades, such as a diagram representing forces on a particular object in a system.
How the Practices Are Integrated into Both Inquiry and Design
How Engineering and Science Differ
Scientific inquiry involves the formulation of a question that can be answered through investigation.
Engineering involves the formulation of a problem that can be solved through design.
