I became a mathematician and not a scientist because science often goes wrong .... You do an experiment 100 times and you get the same result. You do it for the 101st time and something different happens. No one would be my lab partner at school because all my experiments went wrong. Maybe I’m a bad choice for this job.
This set me thinking. Maybe some high-school sciences tudents are intimidated by the thought of an experiment as "something you've got to get right". I have seen this misapprehension carry over, even into some of our PhD students. Carl Wieman, who has put three articles on Optimizing Science Education on this blog, has suggested that simulated experiments may sometimes be better for teaching physics.
What do you all think?
I agree that students think experiments are something to get right, Robert. I remember my high school chemistry class - we were given a list of instructions to follow and we had to fill in the blanks with whatever values we obtained. We weren't learning anything, and we certainly were more concerned with getting the same values as the next lab bench over. Isn't variation a way of learning? As in, why our solution turned blue but the next table's solution turned red. And most importantly, negative results can still be powerful results. It wasn't until college when we had to start thinking in labs - we had to include, along with our experiment results, WHY we obtained those results.
In another post Carl writes:
This is true I think of any field, but definitely in science. In my chemistry, biology and physics classes much of the same material was carried over from subject to subject. Yes, there is a certain amount of redundancy among the sciences and within subjects. That can be good and bad. Carl points out a paragraph later, "research shows that when students develop misconceptions from their initial instruction, these tend to be maintained throughout subsequent instruction." A good example from my undergrad - there was an honors program for those of us that tested out of all interdisciplinary subjects, and in the sophomore year Justice course one of our readings was Plato's Republic. Most of us were both science majors and in the honors program. Somehow every single one of us misinterpreted the Allegory of the Cave, believing that the philosopher kings returned to the cave to help others see the truth. In our senior year course we read excerpts from Plato again in a different context and the cave allegory came up, and our professor was shocked that for two years all of us shared and maintained the same misconception. In this case it was good that we had some repetition, as it corrected the misconception.