Should we expect students to “get” hypothesis testing without real experience? No, and without real experience of hypothesis testing we may undermine years of education. Such an exercise teaches technical skills at the expense of hypothesis testing. A student laboratory exercise may repeat an experiment from decades ago, which has been simplified for teaching, and whose conclusions are well known. Unfortunately, high school and undergraduate science students may have limited exposure to hypothesis testing. The conclusions are already known, and the data and analyses are (consciously or unconsciously) chosen to reach the desired conclusion. Hypothesis testing is the first victim of pseudoscience. We test hypotheses because they can be wrong. Nobel Prize Foundation/WikipediaĪ key phrase is “testing of hypotheses”. Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, but late in his life Pauling promoted vitamin C as a cure-all.
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