Undergraduate science research projects and students - School of ...

Undergraduate Learning in Science Project Working Paper 5community. Furthermore this type of response is a shift from the views 2a-2d which see experiments being performed in response to theoreticaldevelopments. Here experiments are seen as leading to the personaldevelopment of scientific theories.If you do an experiment you can find evidence, like beinga detective, to support certain ideas that you might havethought about or to disprove ideas that you thought aboutbefore (...) It’s a fine tuning of your thinking. 3.B.36.Interviewer: Why do you think scientists do experimentsthen?Student: To test hypotheses, to clarify certain assumptionsand things that they have made. Just to test out theirideas. 3.F.50.2fExperiments and theories are in a cycle of developmentOne student gave this view in their final interview. The response is distinctfrom the others only in the content of the section underlined.3.2.3 DiscussionIt’s often an experiment, a theory comes up first and theexperiment’s designed to solve that theory, obviously theexperiment then creates more theoretical work afterwards.... but I think it’s always to disprove or provesomebody’s, it seems to me to disprove or provesomebody’s theory because that’s the way it goes, youdon’t get any funding or you don’t get erm.. there’s noneed to do an experiment if there’s no sort of theory thatneeds to be proved or disproved. 3.G.48.Our major categories 1 (experiments give information) and 2 (experimentsare related to scientific theories) indicate whether the student explicitlydescribes scientific theory as having a role in experimentation. Category 2statements describe a wide range of possible relationships between theoryand experimentation. Experiments can test theories, support theories, proveor disprove theories, decide between competing theories or enable scientiststo develop theories. This complexity of response may be a consequence ofthe wide range of project types being followed by the students in our sample.This possible relationship between the students’ experience on their projectand their images of science is discussed in sections 6 and 7 of this paper.Table 2 also shows that individual students during a single interview maydescribe experiments as having a variety of roles. For instance student Ddescribes the role of experimentation as ‘adding to the bank of knowledge’(1b), ‘testing a theory’ (2a) and ‘choosing a rival theory’ (2d) during his24