5 Ways to Integrate Science Process Skills in Lessons

Posted by David Wetzel

Integrating the science process skills within your teaching does not require drastic changes. It simply involves making the process of science more explicit in lessons, investigations, and activities you are already using in your curriculum.

The science process skills are the methods used for helping our students understand how we know what we know about the world in which they live. This often means going beyond a science textbook and supplementing the core-content within textbooks. It also means using your course content as a means for exposing students to the real process of science.

In the book, Nature of Science: Part, Present, and Future (2007), Lederman indicates these methods involve making explicit references to the science process skills and allowing students time to reflect on how they participated in the process of investigating science phenomena.

Explicit Teaching

Shifting from an implicit strategy of student understanding to an explicit teaching strategy, helps ensure students understand the correlation between science processes involved in an investigation.

One example - During a lab investigation involving the graphing of a large amount of data students collected:

• First ask them to first draw conclusions on the meaning of their data before graphing it.

• Then have them draw further conclusions after graphing the data.

This process emphasizes the importance of visual representation during data analysis.

Real Data

Nothing can compare when students collect real data personally or use real data from remote networks such as satellites, buoys, or seismic sensors. Using real data in the classroom in any learning process supports student learning through support for:

• inquiry and participation in the scientific method.

• ability to design experiments.

• effective evaluation of data uncertainties and applicability.

• using quantitative and critical thinking skills.

• measurement skills.

• understanding about physical processes, data availability, data access, and data analysis and interpretation.

Problem Based Learning

Using discrepant events in problem based learning invokes critical thinking in students as they hypothesize reasons for what they just witnessed.

Discrepant events typically focus on one scientific concept at a time to control for variables and to avoid conflicting resolutions in students’ minds. These events are created by using:

• Student Interactions: hands-on minds-on investigation (greatest sensory involvement).

• Teacher Demonstrations: student observation (least student involvement).

• Videos: show a video of a scientific event for student observation (least sensory involvement).

Project Based Learning

Project based learning is a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems. Using this type of activity allows students the opportunity to use the science process skills to obtain a deeper knowledge of the science concept(s) they are investigating.

Scientific projects with depth, duration, and complexity challenge students and motivate them towards construction of new scientific knowledge.

These types of projects provide students with the opportunity to use both the basic and integrate science process skills as they collaborate with other students to design an experiment, observe, measure, predict, analyze and organize their data, and communicate their findings.

Tell Stories

Stories fall into two broad categories:

• Historical – which help students understand how scientific knowledge developed over time.

• Current – which help students understand scientific knowledge is a work in progress.

The use of stories results in greater student understanding through connection of science facts to hands-on science investigations. Stories also make the connection to “reasons for needing to know” science. Finally, it stimulates students’ minds to seek or produce explanations – i.e., curiosity.

The Value of these 5 Ways

We know students bring misconceptions to the science classroom and these misconceptions must be acknowledged before new, more accurate concepts can be learned.

Students need to appreciate and value science as a way of knowing. This process of science teaches our students how science works and then they are more likely to interpret a scientific story or debate with the ability to separate right from wrong.