The sad truth about a lot of science instruction today is that most of the experimentation goes on in the lab instead of the classroom. Lab sessions are routine.
Exams are comprehensive but uninspiring.
The beauty of investigative learning, the authors argue, is that it teaches students how to identify researchable questions, design and construct scientific experiments, and use logic and evidence to support their claims. For example, Deborah A. Tolman, a Ph.D. candidate at Portland State University, asked a classroom of nonscience majors to decipher data from a watershed project. They greeted the assignment with silence, which turned into frustration. But she won them over by getting them to stop looking at the scientific method as something foreign. When doing fieldwork, the students must devise hypotheses, design experiments, and assess the resulting data.