section_path: Philosophy and discourse/Education
section_name: Education
paragraph_text: Education
  
  In science education, the idea of a general and universal scientific method has been notably influential, and numerous studies (in the US) have shown that this framing of method often forms part of both students’ and teachers’ conception of science. This convention of traditional education has been argued against by scientists, as there is a consensus that educations' sequential elements and unified view of scientific method do not reflect how scientists actually work.
  
  How the sciences make knowledge has been taught in the context of "the" scientific method (singular) since the early 20th century. Various systems of education, including but not limited to the US, have taught the method of science as a process or procedure, structured as a definitive series of steps: observation, hypothesis, prediction, experiment.
  
  This version of the method of science has been a long-established standard in primary and secondary education, as well as the biomedical sciences. It has long been held to be an inaccurate idealisation of how some scientific inquiries are structured.
  
  The taught presentation of science had to defend demerits such as:
  
  The scientific method no longer features in the standards for US education of 2013 (NGSS) that replaced those of 1996 (NRC). They, too, influenced international science education, and the standards measured for have shifted since from the singular hypothesis-testing method to a broader conception of scientific methods. These scientific methods, which are rooted in scientific practices and not epistemology, are described as the 3 dimensions of scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts (interdisciplinary ideas), and disciplinary core ideas.
  
  The scientific method, as a result of simplified and universal explanations, is often held to have reached a kind of mythological status; as a tool for communication or, at best, an idealisation. Education's approach was heavily influenced by John Dewey's, How We Think (1910). Van der Ploeg (2016) indicated that Dewey's views on education had long been used to further an idea of citizen education removed from "sound education", claiming that references to Dewey in such arguments were undue interpretations (of Dewey).