The National Science Education Standards released by the National
Research Council in 1995 provide valuable insights into the ways that teachers
might sustain the curiosity of students and help them develop the sets of abilities
associated with scientific inquiry. The Standards emphasize that science
education needs to give students three kinds of scientific skills and
understandings. Students need to learn the principles and concepts of science,
acquire the reasoning and procedural skills of scientists, and understand the
nature of science as a particular form of human endeavor. Students therefore
need to be able to devise and carry out investigations that test their ideas, and
they need to understand why such investigations are uniquely powerful. Studies
show that students are much more likely to understand and retain the concepts
that they have learned this way.