Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Assignment #4: Science, Scientific, both, or neither?

Please choose two specific examples of science from your science autobiography and respond to the following question before Tuesday September 4 at noon. Your examples should be specific and identify the activity that you were engaged in. The goal of this exercise is for us to uncover your understanding of the term science as it relates to classroom activities.

What is science?

Are the activities  that you identified from your science autobiography considered (or not) science?
Do not use any other resources; we are interested in your responses/reflections.

You are free to compare/contrast your responses to other resources after inputting your own reflections.

9 comments:

  1. To me, science is knowledge that you attain through practice and study. You can obtain this knowledge through general laws that you test by using the scientific method. These methods may concern the chemical and/or physical world. I believe the activities I identified from my science autobiography were considered science. When I think back from physical science, biology, and chemistry, they all required attaining knowledge through practice and study. For example, in Chemistry, we did multiple experiments to prove a law.

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  2. To me, science is when you do experiments to find out new information. The classes in high school that I would categorize as science ones would be my AP Environmental Science class, Biology and my Organic Chemistry class. In both of these classes, the teacher would engage the students by allowing us to do experiments, dissections and take field trips to engage our learning. I think the activities like the dissections and experiments were science. I remember doing all of these labs because they were interactive and made a lasting impression. The memorization of facts and laws were not necessarily science because I do not remember them.

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  3. Science to me is observing, curiosity, and experiments because of that curiosity. I would say that all of my classes on my time line were science classes because someone had to observe something that they were curious about and then do an experiment to come up with the information we have today. My seventh grade year I had to do the science fair and my partner and I made it to region. Our project was on bean gases. We were curious about how much gas beans really had in them so we did experiments to find out. I feel like anything dealing with the body is science because people are still curious about the body and there is testing done all the time. In my anatomy class we actually got to work with a real cadaver to try and find the muscles that we were studying at the time. It was very interesting.

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  4. To me science is something that deals with life and facts about how the world works and why it is that way. Science answers the question "why" to natural events that take place. Two examples of things that were scientific in my past are the hands on activities that we did in my physics class in high school and everything we did during lab for environmental science in college. Both of these experiences involved experiments that proved the "why" behind the facts of science. When I was able to see for myself how bacteria grew and why this happened it became interesting and I actually learned the information.

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  5. Personally, science is the study of life, the earth, how things work and why they work like that do. I no other field of study do you ask the question "why?" more, and in no other field do you ask that question and never get a real, full-fledged answer, because so much of science is discovery, and questioning. Probably my two most "scientific" like experiments or activities were the dissections I did in both high school and in college, in high school, it was a pig and we were simply analyzing and really getting hands-on with why the body works the way it does, and for the rat, we were doing the same thing on a smaller scale. I think these two experiments stuck out to me so much because they were the ones I enjoyed the most and got the most out of, I was able to compare and contrast the two experiments and compare them to what I knew and wanted to know about the human body and the way it works, which is similar to that of the pig and even the rat. As I said, a lot of science is asking "why" and letting that question lead you to new discoveries and new reasons to ask "why?"

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  6. Science to me is figuring out the how and why things work the way they do. It involves observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting. Honestly I believe I have been doing science my whole life, all humans observe and question, we all experiment (on various levels) and we hypothesize whether we know it or not. In school I think science truly started in second grade with an experiment with bubbles. How do they work, why are they the way they are, how do we make them? All these questions were asked and we experimented with bubbles and observed how they were. From there I truly believe I had scientific classes even until now. Science also involves facts and I think that in all my science classes I was presented facts that we then got to experiment or observe. And maybe that too is important to a science class, the presentation of facts and the ways to observe and experiment with them. If so, then I feel like all my science classes have in fact been science classes.

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  7. I think science is a study of the world around us and the principles or laws that make it work. In my biology classes we observed bacteria under the microscope, and we dissected animals such as a starfish and a rat. These activities are definitely science because studying bacteria and other organisms helps us understand how they are all interconnected. They are all around us and we come in contact with them every day. To explain a little further, they form part of the food web; if something happens to one organism, they are all affected. Knowing more about the habits, characteristics, and environment of organisms gives us a better understanding of our part in the scheme of things. Another science activity was an animated computer program that we used in my college astronomy class to further investigate the planets and nearby stars such as the sun. It wasn’t always first-hand observation, but it allowed us to set up hypothetical situations; for example, we could use data to predict what would happen during an equinox. Using this program helped us to better understand the bodies in our universe because we had to make calculations about distances, sizes, orbits, and other physical features.

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  8. I personally believe that science is the study of a variety of processes and how they manage to work. Science includes the acts of researching, collaborating, teamwork, observing, and experimenting. I believe that I have taking part in science classes since I can remember. The last science class I can remember is my 7th grade science class. I remember performing many dissections, learning more and more about life and our surroundings. From that point on, I noticed that my science classes did include the acts of researching, collaborating, teamwork, observing, and experimenting. Not only were these classes informative in lecture and other forms, but we also got to act as scientists to experiment and research these new findings and explore new concepts ourselves. Science revolves around exploration and new discoveries, so I do in fact believe that all of my science classes have been "science classes." With new discoveries and new findings, science always brings us to more exploration and more in depth research to continue the fun adventures that our surroundings provides.

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  9. In my opinion science is the act of studying, hypothesizing, and conducting experiments in hopes to finding out new information. Science is taking information and figuring out how we can prove it to be correct, and apply it to earthy matters. I would consider the activities i listed in my science autobiography science because they all entailed growing my knowledge through observation and resulted with somewhat of an answer. Whether is was hands on learning, forming hypothesizes, or watching the teacher perform an experiment, i was able to see the scientific method in every experience, and expanded my knowledge.

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