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Book Chapter
A desire to sort and group objects that have similar characteristics is innate to humans. In science, the process of grouping and organizing items and ideas into categories in accordance with specific rules is known as classification. Scientific clas...
Book Chapter
Scientific Inquiry and Scientific Literacy
This chapter provides an overview of what the authors present in this book as well as how the book is laid out. The authors present a synthesis of research findings drawn from science education, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology rele...
Book Chapter
To better understand scientific inquiry and how to teach inquiry-based science, full consideration of the uses, purposes, and limitations of models is important. The information presented in this chapter is a summary of important features related to ...
Book Chapter
Scientific Models and Conceptual Change
For children to progress and develop more robust scientific models, they need to evaluate their simple models against the evidence available to them in science, then choose to modify or even abandon their current models in favor of ones that are mo...
Book Chapter
Evaluating Variables, Explanations, and Models
Two components of scientific inquiry—designing tests and analysis—are important parts of most scientific investigations, Designing and carrying out good and fair investigations of scientific models are more difficult than analyzing data and think...
Book Chapter
Problem solving tends to be messy. Every problem is different, and each one calls for a slightly different approach. Unfortunately, students often have erroneous ideas about what it takes to be good at problem solving, such as “good problem solvers...
Book Chapter
Integrating Content and Scientific Inquiry in Your Lessons
Although no single lesson-planning approach will work every time for every student in every situation, researchers continue to conclude that one particular approach outperforms any other when it comes to effectively teaching scientific concepts. This...
Book Chapter
Documentation and Research Paper Setup
After organizing the raw data from your experiment and performing statistical analysis, you are ready to move to the next part of your research project—sharing the results of your experiment. You do this by writing a STEM research paper and/or prep...
Book Chapter
Presenting the STEM Research Project
An important part of conducting research for all STEM professionals is to communicate their study results. This is generally accomplished in two different ways. The first is to write a scientific paper, in order to have the paper published in a STEM ...
Book Chapter
Graphical representations are visual ways to represent raw data, descriptive statistics, or inferential statistics in order to highlight important findings from a research study. You can use the graphical representations to determine additional stati...
Book Chapter
Inferential Statistics and Data Interpretation
This chapter is organized into two parts. In the first part, the author briefly introduces inferential statistical tests that are commonly used in STEM research. The description of these tests is meant only to provide an overview and to help you dete...
Book Chapter
After you have begun background research on your topic and have a preliminary hypothesis, you will write your proposal. A proposal is a document that describes the proposed experimental design of your research project. Essentially, it is a paper writ...
Book Chapter
Once you have collected data from your experiment, you will need to calculate various descriptive statistics explained in this chapter. This chapter contains guidelines on how to graphically represent data and provide tips on using description and in...
Book Chapter
Designing Scientific Tests and Investigations
Designing tests to evaluate scientific models and explanations is one of the hardest—and at the same time one of the most creative—aspects of science. This chapter is devoted to the process of designing tests and investigations to evaluate models...
Book Chapter
Sailors have known for centuries that ocean currents can speed up or slow down a ship. In modern times, scientists have discovered that ocean currents have major effects on climate and weather patterns, and on the ecology of the ocean and nearby land...