ABSTRACT
A new vision of science teaching moves away from messing about and inquiry in favor of having students engage in the activities of science actually performed by scientists. Discrete but essential actions of science used within science activity: observing, classifying, measuring, predicting, and experimenting. Observing is a science process used at the outset of investigating and involves looking while controlling for personal biases. Asking questions guides and directs scientific investigating. Measuring requires the use of some tool, such as a ruler, to provide a standard to inform observing. The choice of measuring tool becomes more than a matter of being told by the teacher—the students know from their experiences when to select one tool or another. A cultural feature of science is the process of classifying, in which information is organized into groups using observable properties. Predicting is a basic process within the larger activity of developing scientific explanations.
