IBSE Final
34
- Scientific investigations use a variety of methods
o There is no single scientific method and no fixed set of steps that scientists always
follow, no one path that leads them unerringly to scientific knowledge.
- Science cannot provide the answers to all questions.
o Science findings are limited to what can be answered with empirical evidence.
- Scientific explanations, theories and models are those that best fit the evidence available at
a particular time
- Science models, laws, mechanisms, and theories explain natural phenomena.
- Scientific knowledge is based on empirical evidence.
- Scientific knowledge is durable, but it does not represent absolute truth.
- Scientific knowledge is tentative (or open to revision in light of new evidence).
- Science is a human endeavor
- Scientific knowledge is a result of human endeavor, imagination, and creativity.
o Science is a blend of logic and imagination. Scientific explanations do not emerge
automatically from data but are invented in a process that often involves
imagination and logical reasoning.
o Scientists rely on human qualities such as persistence, precision, reasoning, logic,
imagination and creativity.
o Scientists are guided by habits of mind such as intellectual honesty, tolerance of
ambiguity, skepticism and openness to new ideas.
- The knowledge produced by science is used in engineering and technologies to create
products
- Technologies are developed using engineering, which involves defining problems and
using ideas of science and other ideas to design and develop the best possible solution.
- Science, engineering and technology are closely inter-connected.
o Advances in science offer new capabilities, new materials, or new understanding
of processes that can be applied through engineering to produce advances in
technology.
o Advances in technology, in turn, provide scientists with new capabilities to probe
the natural world at larger or smaller scales; to record, manage, and analyze data;
and to model ever more complex systems with greater precision.
o In addition, engineers’ efforts to develop or improve technologies often raise new
questions for scientists’ investigations.
- Applications of science often have ethical, social, economic and political implications.
- Together, advances in science, engineering, and technology can have—and indeed have
had—profound effects on human society, in such areas as agriculture, transportation,
health care, and communication, and on the natural environment. Each system can
change significantly when new technologies are introduced, with both desired effects
and unexpected outcomes.
- All human activity draws on natural resources and has both short and long-term
consequences, positive as well as negative, for the health of people and the natural
environment.
