An Interactive Introduction to Organismal and Molecular Biology

This “textbook” is interactive, meaning that although each chapter has text, they also have interactive HTML5 content, such as quizzes, simulations, interactive videos, and images with clickable hotspots. Students receive instant feedback when they complete the interactive content, and therefore, can learn and check their understanding all in one place. I still consider this textbook to be fairly text-heavy and will continue to make it even more interactive content!

Nature of Science

Learning Objectives

• Identify aspects and misconceptions regarding the nature of science and scientific inquiry.
• Explain how the commonly-taught “scientific method” aligns with the setup of a research paper.
• Describe the processes of science.
• Identify scientific research questions.
• Explain and make scientific observations and inferences.
• Describe the main parts of a scientific argument.
• Given a description of an investigation, describe the type of study, the research question, and control and experimental variables, when appropriate.

To understand what science is, just look around you. What do you see? Perhaps your hand on the mouse, a computer screen, papers, ballpoint pens, the family cat, the sun shining through the window, etc. Science is, in one sense, our knowledge of all that: all the stuff that is in the universe from the tiniest subatomic particles in a single atom of the metal in your computer’s circuits to the nuclear reactions that formed the immense ball of gas that is our sun, to the complex chemical interactions and electrical fluctuations within your own body that allow you to read and understand these words. But just as importantly, science is also a reliable process by which we learn about all that stuff in the universe. However, science is different from many other ways of learning because of the way it is done. Science relies on testing ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world.

Given the way that science is often taught—memorizing facts from a thick textbook based on research done decades ago and completing lab activities in which there is one known answer—many students have misconceptions about what science is and how it works. Complete the following interactive to learn more about the real side of science!