Skinner and Cowan worked with students
in their first year of primary teachers
courses. Most of the students had expressed
a dislike for science. They observed that
high school science laboratory work
involved little or no real problem solving,
with recipe-style exercises at the lowest
levels of openness. Little discovery was
involved in the highly-structured tasks.
Students merely followed a set of
procedures with answers already known.
This way of teaching science undermines the
way research is conducted in the real world,
where scientists conduct experiments “in a
dynamic, creative, and interactive fashion,
constantly observing making sense of
results, hypothesis, evaluating, redesigning
tests and generating new ideas” (Skinner &
Cowan, 1995, p4)