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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7474968" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't disagree too much with [MENTION=6683613]TheCosmicKid[/MENTION]'s post not far upthread. He has school kids doing science, I have them learning to do science. Kids in music class whose recorders are out of tune are probably not making music in my view, but they're learning how to make music.In reply to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]: repeatability is a key element of science, and is importantly related to systematisation and disseminabillity. But few school projects contribute to this process: typically the equiment, the method etc is adjusted in order to produce an already known result, and the kids (or parents) putting it all together aren't keeping the sort of record of the adjustments made and their relationship to changed outcomes that would actual connect the repetition to any sort of confirmation of uncertain results.In my own high school science classes, I remember doing chemistry experiments that had a modest degree of validity, although they were confirming results already extremely well known (although not always well known to those of us doing the experiment - one of the features that contributed to validity). Conversely, in physics class where our equipment was terrible and friction a far from negligible factor in most of what we were doing, the experiments were worthless except as exercises in learning how to follow steps and measure results - the actual outcomes were connected to truth only because we did already know what they should be, and so toyed with our gear and approximated our results in order to fit those predetermined outcomes.And finally, another example (which came up earlier in the thread) of careful, systematic observation and measurement being at the heart of science: the observation that burned material gains rather than loses weight (= mass, but when the experiment was done the distinction wasn't drawn) was central in rebutting the phlogiston theory of combustion. That would count as science even if the person doing the experiment had no conjecture, and no basis for conjecture, as to what the acquired weight consisted in and how it got there.</blockquote>

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