What Is Science? What Do Scientists Do?
Ask the National Academy of Sciences leaders, and they will tell you that there is a culture of science that scientists follow.
Ask the leaders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and they will tell you that there are many different forms of observation, measurement, and study design. For that reason, we don’t use the term scientific method per se.
They are both partially correct. Now try teaching these concepts to student in all grandes, and you are in a quagmire of vagueness that makes it impossible to come up with a practical program.
What is wrong? If you examine what scientists do, you find that they do a million different things. There is a culture to their activities. There is a wide variety of forms of activity.
But there is also a general pattern to their activities. It is not a rigid pattern. In this pattern, they start anywhere, backtrack, skip, loop, make false stops, divert to sub-problems, and other diversions.
From this pattern, our intellectual community, over the centuries, has written about the mental activity stages that are usually involved in the work of scientists.
Over a period of years, I studied the literature carefully and finally arrived at the SM-14 formula for the 11 mental activity stages of the scientific method and condensed the supporting ingredients into three groups - thus the SM-14 formula. It is suitable for a teaching formula for all grades, even through college. Textbook authors are urged to quote it. It is not copyrighted, and it is free for anyone to use in their work or publications.
