Notes on lab science, learning, and what the research says.
Seven short essays from Leslie Nichols, in the order they build on
each other — from what science actually is, through
what the education research keeps confirming, down to what your kid
does on a Saturday morning at the bench.
How Leslie thinks about science teaching
Seven short essays, in the order they build on each other —
from what science actually is, down to what your kid does
on a Saturday morning at the bench.
Most kids learn the “scientific method” as an
eight-step flowchart and never get to take the “No”
arrow. Real science is a loop — and the move that
makes a scientist a scientist is the willingness to design
experiments that could prove them wrong, then run them anyway.
A walk-through of the Cycle of Scientific Enterprise.
K–12 and even college science classes are increasingly delivered as videos
and simulations. The downstream effects on incoming college students —
and the future doctors, nurses, and researchers among them — are
measurable, and they’re not good. Here’s what the research says,
and what we do about it on a Saturday morning in Boise.
Reading notes on John D. Mays’ From Wonder to
Mastery. His diagnosis of conventional middle-school
science is brutal and exactly right; his three pillars
(Mastery, Integration, Wonder) are — with one small
framing adjustment — the model we already run.
Credit where it’s due.
The Carnegie unit was an administrative invention from 1906,
built to standardize faculty pensions. The mastery-learning
research is a century newer and a lot more honest. Why our
cohort moves on when the work is right, not when the bell rings.
A bound, dated, ink-on-paper notebook isn’t a quaint
preference. It’s a different cognitive instrument than a
typed document — and it teaches a kind of seeing that the
cleanly-edited Google Doc quietly trains away.
The kids who are most worried about it are usually the ones who
get the most out of it. Why reverence (not callousness) is the
first thing learned at the bench — and what a real frog
teaches that a video can’t.
If you can’t explain it to a 7th grader, you don’t
actually know it. Why every Bright Minds student stands up in
week eight and defends their work, out loud, to their peers and their
family.
