Teaching the Hypothesis

04 Nov 2018 at 17:52 // under misc

When writing yesterday's post I remembered my own introduction to experiments at school. I loved science and I loved finding stuff out. What I didn't love was getting things wrong and I could not understand why they forced us to make a guess about what would happen before we carried out the experiment.

Why do we have to write a hypothesis?

This applied to experiments in both primary and secondary school. We were required to write up our experiments with a hypothesis but it was never explained why. We were never really taught the scientific method at any stage, just the things that the method let's us learn.

We were never taught that the reason you write a hypothesis first is that the you should use the hypothesis to design the experiment. The experiment is there to see if the hypothesis is true. It doesn’t matter if the hypothesis is true or not, you still learn.

It is not the experimenter who is wrong when the experiment disproves a hypothesis, just the hypothesis.

Looking back, it seems odd that something so fundamental to science can get completely overlooked by the education system.

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