It relies on a willingness to come up with questions that reflect these interests. This attitude of curiosity permeates the inquiry process and is the fuel that allows it to continue. In the scenario above, the children learned important scientific ideas about how plants grow and also discovered new information on their own. By linking new ideas to existing ideas, children can change conceptual models and build up a rich array of experiences. Very often this method is presented as a linear sequence of activities, which it need not be.
Scientists move back and forth among processes to refine their knowledge as the inquiry unfolds.
Frequently, the scientific method as taught by non-scientists requires that a scientific inquiry must stem from a hypothesis, which in fact is not usually true. In these three cases, as well as a great majority of other crucial scientific inquiries, there was an exploration of the unknown, with not nearly enough previous knowledge to support an initial hypothesis on which to focus the exploration. If we have a great deal of previous knowledge, we might hypothesize. We can begin every scientific inquiry with a question. If we insist on a hypothesis we will often merely force an unscientific guess.