This activity will challenge students thinking about the nature of science and highlight the importance of both basic and applied scientific research.
This lesson introduces students to the nature of science and how to evaluate evidence to determine whether they are engaging in science or pseudoscience.
This resource explores the cultural context of scientific inquiry through an interdisciplinary lens. Undergraduate students are invited to follow two characters from William Shakespeare’s play King Lear who debate the cosmos with various scientists from the 17th – 20th centuries, including Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Marie Curie. The joined scientific / literary lens models how intellectual questions about knowledge and analysis often draw from interrelated traditions of thought and practice, and asks students to consider the nature of their own intellectual questions. The resource is broken into five brief modules and can be completed entirely in class, or in partial increments as take-home.