It’s altogether too easy to reduce all method in science to a simple algorithm. Hypothesize, deduce (or predict), test, evaluate, conclude. It seems like a handy formula for authority. “The” Scientific Method (expressed in this way) haunts the introductions of textbooks, lab report guidelines, and science fair standards. Yet it is a poor model for learning about method in science. One might endorse instead teaching about the scientist’s toolbox. Science draws on a suite of methods, not just one. The methods also include model building, analogy, pattern recognition, induction, blind search and selection, raw data harvesting, computer simulation, experimental tinkering, chance, and (yes) play, among others. The toolbox concept remedies two major problems in the conventional view. First, it credits the substantial work—scientific work—in developing concepts or hypotheses. Science is creative. Even to pursue the popular strategy of falsification, one must first have imaginative conjectures. We need to foster such creative thinking skills among students. Second, the toolbox view supports many means for finding evidence—some direct, some indirect, some experimental, some observational, some statistical, some based on controls, some on similarity relationships, some on elaborate thought experiments, and so on. Again, students should be encouraged to think about evidence and argument broadly. Consider just a few historical examples. First, note Watson and Crick’s landmark model of DNA. It was just that: a model. They drew on data already available. They also played with cardboard templates of nucleotide bases. Yes, their hypothesis of semiconservative replication was eventually tested by Meselson and Stahl—later. But even that involved enormous experimental creativity (essay 4). Consider, too, Mendel’s discoveries in inheritance (essay 22). Mendel did not test just seven traits of pea plants, cleverly chosen in advance (as the story is often told). Rather, he seems to have followed twenty-two varieties exhibiting fifteen traits, hoping for patterns to emerge. He ultimately abandoned those varieties whose results he called confusing. Nobelist Thomas Hunt Morgan, in Mendel’s wake, did not discover sex linkage through any formal hypothesis about inheritance.
Eye and pointer coordination in search and selection tasks
