South 고등학교 1학년 Science Inquiry Experiments 1
Chapters: 2
1. Nature of science and inquiry in history
Key experiments that shifted paradigms · Nature of science from history
- History of Science: How Our Ideas About Nature Changed – Science grew slowly over 5,000 years. Early civilisations watched the sky to make calendars. Greek thinkers asked why things happen and used reason. Indian and Islamic scholars gave us zero, algebra and careful experiments. In the Scientific Revolution, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton replaced the Earth-centred model with a Sun-centred one and tested ideas by experiment. Modern science brought atoms, evolution, relativity and quantum theory. Each step shows the same lesson: good evidence can overturn old ideas.
- Nature of Science: How Scientific Knowledge Is Built and Changed – Science is a way of knowing that rests on evidence anyone can check. Scientists observe, infer, test ideas that could be proved wrong, and let other experts check their work. Laws describe what happens; theories explain why. Scientific knowledge is reliable but always open to change, and sometimes a whole way of seeing (a paradigm) is replaced.
2. Processes of scientific inquiry
Observation and inductive inquiry · Hypothesis-testing experiments · Analysing qualitative and quantitative data · Collaborative inquiry
- The Scientific Method – The scientific method is the careful way scientists find out how the world works. Observe something, ask a testable question, make a hypothesis (a clear, testable guess), test it with a fair experiment (change one variable, measure one, keep the rest the same), repeat and record data, analyse it, draw a conclusion and share it so others can check. Results that fail the test are useful too: they send you back to a new hypothesis.
- Data Analysis – Data analysis means turning raw data into answers. It follows a cycle: ask a question, collect data, clean it (remove errors, repeats and blanks), organise and transform it, analyse it with summaries such as mean, median, range and patterns, show it with a good chart, and draw a careful conclusion. Watch for outliers, small samples and bias, and remember that a correlation between two things does not prove that one causes the other. Data must also be stored safely and used with permission.