Recently, I have been looking through some writing I did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of it is not noteworthy but some if it is. This post is drawn from a note I made in the spring of 1993.
Science fair projects are a staple of science teaching (or at least it was back then). The process is grounded in “the scientific method” and it finds students defining a question, speculating on its answer, and finding if it is correct.
I used the term “speculating on its answer” rather than the approved language of “forming a hypothesis” because that is the actual process we encouraged in our students. We followed the textbook version of “the scientific method” and how we encouraged students to follow it in science fair projects.
I suggested in 1993 that this misguided model of science and experimentation was actually giving our students the idea that science is quite wrong. I wrote “We are encouraging bias into observations and encouraging students to make sure their data fit their hypothesis.” We call this “cherry picking the data.”
I don’t claim that how we did science fairs those decades ago the caused any lasting impact of life today. I did write “that science education that more accurately reflects how we do science rather than finding ‘the data that supports my claim’ is the kind of sill that our students will need as they enter the next century.”
It is interesting that the “next century” about which I wrote is the current century (which is a quarter over), and we find sound scientific findings being rejected by politically powerful people. Science, for these people and those who follow them, seems to be just like we practiced in the 1990s: Find the data that proves you are correct and ignore the rest.