The Nature of Science and the Learning Cycle

In the Learning Cycle children engage in explorations of the world around them, and with the teacher's assistance develop ideas and concepts and then apply them to other areas as well as their own everyday lives. The key point here is the experiences (data collection) that the students have are then developed conceptually in the appropriate contexts. The students are learning by doing rather than being placid receptacles of information being fed to them by reading, lectures, notes, etc. The teacher is simply the guide and mentor who facilitates the process. The process of science itself then, is being employed to bring about understanding of the world and how it works. This is because, as several well-known scientists have phrased it with only slight differences in wording, in science we are trying to "coordinate our experiences into a logical system", "extend the range of our experience and reduce it to order", or "science is the quest for knowledge, not the knowledge itself". Regardless of which definition one prefers, the main point is that we cannot teach science without the process, which is the nature of science itself.

Bibliographic Note:

Edmund Marek and Ann Cavallo, The Learning Cycle: Elementary School Science and Beyond, (Portsmouth NH, Heinemann, 1997).

http://sde.state.ok.us/home/defaultie.html (PASS Objectives, Oklahoma State Board of Education, 2002).

http://books.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nses/ (National Science Education Standards from the National Academy of Sciences, 1995).