Students look for patterns and potential relationships among natural phenomena or data. Students in this phase are working in collaborative groups, sharing ideas, generating possible hypotheses, and rearranging data presentation. Students work in the same mode as contemporary scientists formulation ideas about manipulated, responding, controlled, relevant and irrelevant variable for study.
Students formalize a question to address.
A study is designed, conducted, and results are analyzed using the traditional scientific method. The key part of the phase is that teams of students are answering their own questions instead of the traditional verification and error analysis laboratory. Students inductively explore generalizations of their own experimental results, to formally and constructively critique other student's work, or to conduct further experiments regarding identified weakness in their studies. The important component is to simulate the ongoing authenticity inherent to scientific investigations. Students are first divided into research teams.