Pose Significant Questions That Can Be Investigated Empirically (National Research Council, 2002)
“This means that the process of scientific inquiry (the stronger thinking about and understanding the world) requires that we ask questions that will help to advance a specific field of knowledge, and that can be (attempted to be) answered with observable, measurable, evaluateable, and reportable data and reporting of some kind.
This involves the creation of hypotheses about real-world phenomena, to discover new knowledge, new causes, and new linkages of knowledge/phenomena.“
Hypotheses – what are they? Well, hypotheses are very specific questions that we can answer in very specific ways. We’ll get into that with a bit more detail, next.
To be successful within this first Scientific Principle, you need to create your hypotheses (questions) quite carefully and with much rigor (of the intellectual kind, not the physical/constitutional kind).
See the book Reason & Rigor: How Conceptual Frameworks Guide Research (Ravitch & Riggan, 2012), by a dear friend of mine, Dr. Sharon Ravitch.
These hypotheses must be refutable – meaning that you must ask these questions such that the answers cannot be known, a priori.
- For example, the hypothesis “Will the two rational numbers ‘1’ and ‘5’ when combined through the property of addition, sum to the rational number ‘6?’” This hypothesis, though you can investigate a solution, already has a known solution. Therefore, it is not a refutable hypothesis.
- Also, the hypothesis regarding the sum of “1” and “5” is not significant, as it does nothing to advance the existing and related body of knowledge – Mathematics.
Empirically, however, we can “investigate” this example hypothesis. Simple, replicatable tests, like making a pile of “1” grain of white rice next to a pile of “5” grains of white rice, and pushing the two piles into a single pile then counting the number of grains of white rice in the final pile is an empirical way to test the hypothesis. We can also use different items, and other researchers can also replicate this and similar tests. (I will discuss this concept and the importance of replicability, later.) But this is not sufficient to meet the criteria for Scientific Principle 1.
- This concept of being empirical, is not easy when it comes to observing, asking question about, and assessing humans and their behavior. Many people seem to believe the opposite, though, and act within this world without the slightest thought to the contrary … or even that the contrary might possibly exist. (Here is an interesting time to start becoming curious about the concept of cognitive dissonance, which will be the focus of another, future blog post).
This SCIENFIFIC PRINCIPLE 1 has been problematic for researchers in the behavior, learning / thinking / education, and mental states of people.
CONSIDER:
When living our lives around and regarding the behavior of people, how often do we just believe that something is true or that we already believe we know what the other person is going to do or had done … or why (s)he will do it or had done it?
Why is it that we sometimes (or often) don’t think to ask?
Why do people continue to believe that every person has the knowledge and set of skills to be a successful parent in this modern society, when humans do not?
Why do people continue to believe that the act of becoming an educator (“teacher”) suddenly makes the person able to manage all the varied behaviors of all the varied children in the classroom, when it does not?
Similar problems have plagued researchers who, for example, failed to realize that they did not include a critical variable(s) – a variable that just wasn’t within the researcher’s collection of experiences.
In the research within these soft fields of study, the variables become more difficult to specify with sufficient clarity for all to understand. The model that includes of all the different variables can become quite complex, and determining all the important variables to consider can be difficult. Yes, researchers are (ought to be) taught to delve deeply into existing research and look for important variables that the researchers ought also consider, and their graduate-level course and independent reading in their chosen, narrow field within their area of study should include investigation into related variables. However, sometimes researchers do not find connections between variables, or they might not believe that the other variables are important.
Think about how many times you felt upset or angry at a friend who was already 30 minutes late to pick you up, to avoid traffic and get to a scheduled event … and now that the friend is already 30 minutes late, the traffic will be congested and you won’t be able to get to the event before it starts.
Without realizing it, you probably made a hypothesis, which you even could have investigated empirically. You just ignored the process of collecting all the relevant data, and you made the a priori assumption that you already had enough data based on the prior experiences of your friend being late on numerous occasions over the last 10 years you knew her/him.
In this situation regarding SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE 1, you failed to pose a significant question (hypothesis), in an empirical way, and then consider all the possible variables specific to this question (hypothesis).
Here:
- we let emotions, based on prior experiences, guide our thinking, and give us an emotional behavior (the response).
- We got angry at our friend because we failed to wait until we could ask all the questions, specifically asking our friend what happened. There could have been an accident on the highway that brought traffic to a standstill, and caused our friend to be late – beyond our friend’s ability to change other variables and be on time. Worse yet, our friend could have been involved in that accident.
- But we still get upset or angry before we have all the variables. Why? Because in our daily lives, we don’t think with a scientific perspective. We make poor assumptions (questions … hypotheses that we can investigate empirically), then make decisions usually not using enough of and the most useful variables, without investigating them, and have emotional responses based on those assumptions. We don’t think critically. We aren’t thinking strongly.
What have we learned from Scientific Principle 1: Pose Significant Questions That Can Be Investigated Empirically?
To think stronger:
- We need to recognize that we make assumptions about the truth of our own reactions and thoughts; of the statements of:
- other people around us
- the statements of “talking heads,” politicians, leaders, physicians, and other authority figures
- the statements filtered and tailored for us on social media
- memes, news, and advertisements
- We need to STOP ourselves when we start to make assumptions
- We need to START thinking about the variables that we failed to consider and about what kinds of variables might also be important
- We need to use these variables to ask a question or questions that:
a. have clearly defined words and concepts – those variables
b. you can evaluate using measurable outcomes (possibilities) [even if we measure the outcome in a binary way, for example: as “yes or no”]
- We need to STOP AND THINK about the situation that caused us to start asking questions, and reevaluate whether the questions we asked are valuable – that they will provide some sort of insight into:
a. what we don’t already know about the world, the people, and the situations in which we live,
or
b. changing what we already thought we knew (believed to be true)
(Continue to SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE 2)
