The Real Scientific Method

Charlotte Mason said, “out-of-door nature-study lays the foundation for science.” (3/281) But have you ever wondered how that works?

To explain, I must start by clearing up a scientific myth — the ‘scientific method’ that you learned in school is ordinarily not used by scientists at all. The multi-step list seems to have started innocently enough when in 1945 a man named Keeslar prepared a paper with a list of things associated with scientific research. He submitted the list to research scientists and the items that were highly ranked were put in a logical order and made part of a final list of elements associated with the investigation of scientific problems. Textbook writers adopted this list as the description of how science is done and the “scientific method” was born. But scientists don’t usually conduct their research in the order outlined in the scientific method. They sometimes use it as an outline to write up their findings, but some people even take offense to this practice. (McComas)

The scientific method then is a disjointed group of things a scientist does, just as a textbook is a somewhat disjointed list of things a student should learn in a particular field of science. Neither takes into account the natural way people learn or make discoveries in science. Charlotte Mason, on the other hand, always took into account the natural way people learn. She had an intuitive sense of the way a child would best learn a subject, but more importantly, the way a child would best come to care about a subject.

Chad Orzel, the twenty-first-century author of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, makes the point that science is a fundamentally human endeavor — something that we all do. When you pull a cake out of the oven that has not risen, you think scientifically. When you discover your phone didn’t charge even though it had been plugged in all night, you think scientifically. When you see a wedge of geese flying overhead in February, you think scientifically.

Orzel, explains that to think scientifically we use a four-step process: we Look, Think, Test, and Tell.

• Look at some phenomenon in the world,
• Think up a possible explanation for it,
• Test your explanation by further observations or by experiments,
• Tell everyone you know about the results.

Let’s look at how nature study lays a foundation for science in each of these areas:

Look At Some Phenomenon In The World

Charlotte Mason said, “In his early years the child is all eyes; he observes, or, more truly, he perceives, calling sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing to his aid, that he may learn all that is discoverable by him about every new thing that comes under his notice.” (1/65)

This sensory training lays the foundation for science through better observation. As our children spend time in nature, they are learning to look more closely through the use of all of their senses.

Think about the discovery of “wandering stars.” There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and yet early astronomers noticed that a few of them periodically move in the wrong direction. Do you know your night sky well enough that you would notice when one single star didn’t behave correctly? I am only now getting to the point where I recognize when something looks different in the sky. In fact, a few nights ago I noticed a bright star that I had never seen before. At first, I thought it was a plane because it twinkled so brightly with orange lights, but after watching for several minutes, I realized that it didn’t move as I would expect. I then used my iPhone app (Sky Guide) to discover that it is a star called Arcturus. When reading about it, I learned that it is the fourth brightest star and that it is orange in color. It was fun to ‘discover’ something new in the sky, but I would never have noticed Arcturus in the first place if I hadn’t watched the night sky regularly for the last few years and became familiar with it to some degree.

It was in the same way that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. He accidentally left a cover off of a dish used to cultivate bacteria, and a mold that contained penicillin contaminated the sample. There was no problem, no hypothesis, no question to start with. It was a change that he observed.

Charlotte Mason suggested several nature activities be used during outside time to help increase a child’s attention and the use of his five senses:

• ‘Sight-seeing’ (1/45)
• ‘Picture painting’ (1/48)
• Bird-stalking (1/89)
• Pictorial geography (1/72)
• Nature walks (1/29, 54)
• Special studies (6/219)
• Object lessons (2/180)

Through each of these activities, the children’s ability to use their senses increases. The world around them is no longer background wallpaper. Instead, they notice things in a very deep way.

In addition to the list of activities above, all of which rely on direct observation, Charlotte Mason assigned books to open the children’s eyes and helped them know what to look for. She said:

“our main dependence is on books as an adjunct to out-of-door work … They learn what to observe, and make discoveries for themselves, original so far as they are concerned. They are put in the right attitude of mind for scientific observations and deductions, and their keen interest is awakened.” (3/238)

Later students will use tools to extend their human senses, such as through the use of microscopes and transmitters. These tools will assist in gathering accurate data by reducing the occurrence of error in human perception, but using them without first honing their ability to use the five senses means a student is just learning to use a tool.

Also, Charlotte Mason warns us that children are adept at asking questions when they are little, but too often adults relieve them of the effort by providing answers instead of allowing the child to think about it further. Charlotte Mason said:

The child must think, get at the reason why of things for himself, every day of his life, and more each day than the day before. Children and parents both are given to invert this educational process. The child asks ‘Why?’ and the parent answers…Let the parent ask ‘Why?’ and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over and over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him––and he will remember it––the reason why. Every walk should offer some knotty problem for the children to think out––”Why does that leaf float on the water, and this pebble sink?” and so on. (1/153-54)

Another way Charlotte Mason’s method causes a child to think is by emphasizing classification, but maybe not in the way you think. As children learn to discriminate, they begin to make rough classifications. Mason said:

For convenience in describing they should be able to name and distinguish petals, sepals, and so on; and they should be encouraged to make such rough classifications as they can with their slight knowledge of both animal and vegetable forms. Plants with heart-shaped or spoon-shaped leaves, with whole or divided leaves; leaves with criss-cross veins and leaves with straight veins; bell-shaped flowers and cross-shaped flowers; flowers with three petals, with four, with five; trees which keep their leaves all the year, and trees which lose them in autumn; creatures with a backbone and creatures without; creatures that eat grass and creatures that eat flesh, and so on. To make collections of leaves and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form, affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing of differences and resemblances.

The power to classify, discriminate, distinguish between things that differ, is amongst the highest faculties of the human intellect, and no opportunity to cultivate it should be let slip; but a classification got out of books, that the child does not make for himself, cultivates no power but that of verbal memory. (1/64)

Little by little they put the pieces together. Whether it’s to discriminate between similar species or discover the scientific laws that apply to all of us.

Another way of thinking is to guess what might happen in the future. For instance, a child might see flower bulbs pushing out of the ground in the last week of January and he might ask himself, “Does that mean we will have an early spring?”

Test Your Explanation By Further Observations Or Experiments

The next step in thinking scientifically is to “Test your explanation by further observations or experiments.” Take note that Orzel does not simply say test your explanation through experiments. He says by further observations or experiments. We just talked about the idea that sometimes thinking means making predictions for the future. To test those questions we have to keep watching to see if our prediction is correct. Does the daffodil that began pushing its way out of the ground in January die in a hard February frost, or does spring come early? Remember my question about whether the geese I’ve seen flying over means that spring is near? A child will have to pay attention to the weather and even record what happens throughout the coming months.

Charlotte Mason agreed that this was an essential component of a scientific education. She pointed out that, “The mind can know nothing save what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to the mind by itself.” (3/181, emphasis mine) And what is the step of testing but the student finding an answer to their own question?

The educational community argues that a true experiment is one in which the scientist, no matter that he is 8 or 48, creates to answer his own question. Because of this, I would point out that science experiments done during lessons are actually activities or demonstrations, but not true experiments. However, I would then argue that children are conducting true experiments all the time. Start noticing the experiments your children are doing quite naturally when they are playing, helping to cook or garden, or studying nature.

I would remind you again that you must let them ask their questions without your interference. When a child is young, he is very adept at asking questions, but we have to be sure we are allowing him to try to answer these questions. Not just providing all the answers.

Furneaux said:

Throughout the whole lesson you should be careful to do nothing for the children which they can do for themselves— tell them nothing which they themselves can discover, and offer no explanation where it is possible for them to solve the matter themselves. (A Nature Guide by William Samuel Furneaux, ch 2)

Through observing, thinking and then testing, our children learn to think scientifically. It will not occur to them that the only questions to be answered are the ones that have been asked by others. Instead, they are motivated to discover natural laws themselves.

Tell Everyone You Know About The Results

The last step is to “Tell everyone you know about the results.” In a Charlotte Mason education telling happens by keeping a daily record in a nature notebook. But note that narrating is also a way to think through what you know. In the book Writing to Know, William Zinsser explains that writing what you have learned helps you hone your understanding and forces you to make sense of the ideas. It’s then that you are actually learning.

Also, this process builds language skills. Charlotte Mason said:

With his knowledge of things, his vocabulary grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to express. This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the knowledge they have. (1/68)

Children learn to describe an object based on absolute observations or comparisons to other objects. Miss Mason said, “It is important that children should learn to recognise that high, sweet, bitter, long, short, agreeable, are comparative terms; while square, round, black, white, are positive terms, the application of which is not affected by comparison with other objects.” (2/183)

So again with the overlap — as they are telling, they are also thinking.

Nature Study Lays the Foundation for Science

I hope you can see that in a very practical way, nature study lays the foundation for science. I might even go so far as to suggest that science lessons don’t teach a child to think scientifically and that without nature study, our students are only learning to do the work of scientists without the understanding.

In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv quotes a professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He explains:

Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, “because the students have so little real world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed the car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up the garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines.” (Louv, p. 67)

That does not give me a lot of confidence. The fact is, we have lost sight of what promotes scientific thinking in our STEM-centered culture. I will leave you with one final thought from our brilliant mentor Charlotte Mason:

Years hence, when the children are old enough to understand that science itself is in a sense sacred and demands some sacrifices, all the ‘common information’ they have been gathering until then, and the habits of observation they have acquired, will form a capital groundwork for a scientific education. In the meantime, let them consider the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air. (1/63, emphasis mine)

References:

Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006.
McComas W.F. (1998) The Principal Elements of the Nature of Science: Dispelling the Myths. In: McComas W.F. (eds) The Nature of Science in Science Education. Science & Technology Education Library, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht
Orzel, Chad. Eureka!: Discovering Your Inner Scientist. Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2014.