The Design Challenge approach to teaching biology attempts to make the student and instructor focus on the important core questions
The design challenge can also be a way for students to have a more clean understanding of material. Creating questions helps students think about the material, and gives the instructor a signal of how much and how well the student actually knows the material as well.
hey must be accurate enough to make measurements with sufficient certainty to draw conclusions about whether changes in independent variables actually influence the value of a dependent variable.
Making accurate measurements are crucial. The more accurate the results from your experiments are, the more accurate your conclusion from your experiment is going to be. It is important to make sure that you are doing work with detail, because it can really affect your results with your dependent and independent variables.
Many people think that making meaningful observations and asking useful questions is the easiest part of the scientific method. This is not always the case. Why? Seeing what others have not yet asked and creativity both take work and thoughtful reflection!
I agree with piece of the text. The idea that creating a question for an observation can actually be one of the more challenging parts of the scientific method. I believe in order to ask a question, you actually need to have a good idea/understanding of what material you are observing. The more you know what you are studying, the better, and more concise questions you are going to be asking.
Some questions are designed to stimulate thought and discussion rather than to elicit a discrete answer. If called on, you should not feel compelled to have one "right" answer!! Understanding this is very important. Once you realize that it is perfectly acceptable (and sometimes desirable) to not know all of the answers
I fully agree with this! I feel like as a whole, we always think that whenever we get called on we need to know the answer fully in order to answer the question, which is totally wrong. I believe no matter whether the answer is correct, half true, or even fully wrong, we learn so much. In fact, when an answer to a question is wrong, its better than the answer being correct. I believe when someone answers a question wrong, it gives an opportunity to actually work through the problem, and actually figure out what the correct answer is, and why its correct.
Some people may think studying biology is only about medicine—however, it can lead to or influence many careers. Biology has applications that are both vast and wide-ranging. Applications include treating (human or other animal) patients, improving agricultural practices, developing new building materials, writing new energy policies, remedying global climate change, creating new works of art—the list goes on and on.
This is such an important fact to note down. A lot of people, even including myself sometimes forget how applicable the subject of biology is to lots of everyday topics and areas. Sometimes I forget biology is not just associated with medicine and the medical area, but also affects community work, upcoming technology, and modern day art as well.