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.