What's Inside? An activity on experiment, hypotheses, and inference
Students learn about the nature of science by experimenting with little black boxes containing a steel ball as a probe of the interior structure of the box. Students make testable hypotheses, text them and modify them, and compare with results found by other students. Further descriptions and activity sheets are attached.

Organizing Scientific Writing
I give writing assignments along with some explicit instructions about how to organize their writing. Drafts are reviewed by peers and the instructor.

Peat Bogs of Allegan County: A Field-Based Research Project Involving College and High School Students
By Suzanne DeVries-Zimmerman, Hope College Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences Project Goals The Hope College REACH (Research Experience Across Cultures) program is a 6-week summer research program ...

Density, Isostasy, and Topography
Anne Egger, Stanford University The original activity Density, Isostasy, and Topography already exists within the SERC website. This page describes how this activity can be used to teach about the process of ...

Science as Storytelling for Teaching the Nature of Science
Barry Bickmore, Brigham Young University The original activity Science as Storytelling for Teaching the Nature of Science already exists within the SERC website. This page describes how this activity can be used ...

Introducing a new representation of the process of science
This set of warm-up activities uses the example of investigating the dinosaur extinction to introduce fundamental concepts regarding the nature and process of science--especially, debunking the myth of THE Scientific Method.

Book Report - Practitioners of Science
Students read a book written by a practitioner of science and relate it to the nature of science. Components of the 1-2 page written report include a brief summary of the book, connections to course topics, and a bibliographic citation.

Mineral Cleavage: a practical experiment
In this geology activity, students investigate the physical property of mineral cleavage by physically trying to break down a block of halite and describing the results. This lab addresses many misunderstandings non-majors have about the physical properties of minerals and includes a brief write up of their conclusions.

Conservation of angular momentum...see it, feel it, a simple, seat of the pants demonstration
Students explore angular momentum using a rotating chair and their own bodies.

6 classroom discussion starters to teach the process and nature of science
I have included slides here that were used to initiate a half dozen class discussions of about 10 students each. The topics were: Ownership and Sharing, Scientists as public figures, Intuition and pattern recognition vs. controlled experiments, Public engagement with vs. as scientists, Democratization of scientific information, and Data deluge (includes Understanding Sci flowcht).