Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. The scientific method is a series of processes that people can use to gather knowledge about the world around them, improve that knowledge, and attempt to explain why and/or how things occur. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. The Scientific Method The scientific method is a systematic approach to gather knowledge to answer questions about the world we live in. The surprising history of the scientific method-from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps-and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century. Introduction to Scientific Method Lesson 1 Activity 1 Lecture/Notes on the Scientific Method use overhead to go through notes outline with students.
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