One of the things that has been popping up in our readings and videos is the idea that it's okay to be wrong. When I was in school, I never once heard a teacher say to the class, "It's okay if you didn't get the result you hoped for." I could have used some encouragement in that area. We all could have.
My classroom environment was very much a right-or-wrong-answer type of learning. But in the field of science, sometimes you get results that you don't expect. And that's okay. In fact, sometimes the "failed" experiments are the ones that lead to amazing and helpful discoveries! Some of the best "failed" experiments yielded such discoveries as penicillin and the properties and behavior of light. With every unsuccessful attempt at nuclear fusion, scientists are closer to the realization that it either is or is not possible. Some of those "failed" experiments and their benefits for human kind can be found here:
http://io9.com/5053093/the-most-spectacular-failed-scientific-experiments
It is so important to teach our students that inconclusive results are very common in the field of science. They either provide an answer to a question or raise more questions -- quite often, they do both of these things. This is how new hypotheses are formed and tested, and this is how new discoveries are made. We need to provide our students with the skills they need to question and experiment, not harp on whether they were right or wrong in their thinking. If we threw in the towel at every failed attempt at understanding, I'm pretty sure we would never have learned to cook our food, much less traveled in space. And MTV never would have had the top of the hour rocket launch:
So remember, kids, your failed science experiment might lead to the next big thing. And we wouldn't want to deprive future generations of music lovers from exploiting your discoveries now, would we?
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