(Snaffled from a friend on FB.)<\/p>\n
When I was a middle school science teacher all of the life science texts available to us included a “Lab Manual.” Without fail, every lab manual from major science text publishers walked teachers and students through how to follow a recipe to reword a weak hypothesis, how to follow a poorly written experiment that never accounted for all of the variables, and then how to write vague conclusion built on conjecture from a rubric that told the student how to regurgitate unsupported science verbatim in order to get the most points for the assignment.<\/p>\n
As a teacher, I was aware that none of our classroom experiments taught my students how to ask hard questions or how to consider known and unknown variables, or how to isolate those variables. I had a gut feeling that I was really not teaching anything but how to follow the leader. I wrote my own cognitive dissonance off by assuming that these were the in-depth studies that my students would take on later, in more advanced biology classrooms.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, biology students by and large never experience any more advanced labs that require them to test the foundational experiments upon which modern biology and medical science are built.<\/p>\n
Rockefeller was an incredibly clever bastard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Snaffled from a friend on FB.) When I was a middle school science teacher all of the life science texts available to us included a “Lab Manual.” Without fail, every lab manual from major science text publishers walked teachers and students through how to follow a recipe to reword a weak hypothesis, how to follow … <\/p>\n