Science Thinking Skills, Activity Center Finding the Pattern, Natural Mysteries Making Models Testing the Theory, Investigate! Putting It to Work, coming Playing with Ideas, coming Seeing the Unseen, Observatory
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Science Thinking Skills
Providing visitors practice in science thinking skills

Exhibit Development Resource

Exhibit List
Thinking Skills
     Seeing the Unseen
     Finding the Pattern
     Making Models
     Testing the Theory
     Putting It to Work
     Playing with Ideas
Exhibit Prototyping
Universal Design (Accessibility)
Education Standards
Traveling Exhibits

Science as an Activity Wheel

 

"Science, mathematics, and technology are defined as much by what they do and how they do it as they are by the results they achieve. To understand them as ways of thinking and doing, as well as bodies of knowledge, requires that students have some experience with the kinds of thought and action that are typical of those fields."

Science For All Americans (1989)

 

Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them . . . . Science at last repspects the scientist more than his theories; for by its nature it must prize the search above the discovery, and the thinking (and with it the thinker) above the thought. In the society of scientists each man, by the process of exploring for the truth, has earned a dignity more profound than his doctrine.

Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

 

In 1989, the Museum of Science adopted a long-range exhibit plan that focuses on developing exhibits that provide visitors with practice in science thinking skills. This comprehensive, Museum-wide plan is based on the idea that what visitors do as they interact with exhibits is as important as what content they learn. While a taxonomy of science content was readily available from many sources, we had to develop our own taxonomy of science thinking skills based upon what great science teachers have written about the nature of science.


     Seeing the Unseen
     Finding the Pattern
     Making Models
     Testing the Theory
     Putting It to Work
     Playing with Ideas

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Additional References

Science Is an Activity: How we came to focus on science thinking skills

Project 2061 Tools

 

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· Traveling Exhibits

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