Uncertainty in Science Practice
The Investigations Framework
Science practice is fundamentally about moving between a phenomenon-some process or part of the world the investigator is trying to understand- and an explanation of how or why that phenomenon occur. To test out explanations of a phenomenon, the investigator re-represents it in an investigation that simplifies and makes it more manageable and then decides how to make sense of observations and develop evidence. Once they have developed findings based on evidence, they still need to consider how these help them develop the explanation.
The transitions between phenomenon, investigation, evidence, and explanation are not obvious — they are places investigators experience substantial uncertainty. They are where much of the creativity, science practice, collaboration, and conceptual progress of science occur.
This tool describes forms of uncertainty that emerge when scientists are using investigations to make progress on understanding phenomena.
We locate each form of uncertainty in one of the transitions above to help us think about why it occurs and resources we can draw on.
NOTE: These aren’t meant to describe all forms of uncertainty that scientists and students experience. Nor are they totally separate from each other – as you start to work with them, you’ll see that they often overlap or are connected. Don’t feel you have to memorize these or match all the kinds of uncertainty in your investigations to them. Use them as they are helpful for anticipating and making sense of the questions, confusions, or opportunities for discussion that come up for you and your students.
Uncertainty between phenomenon & explanation
The work of investigations is fundamentally about developing a description and explanation of a phenomenon that is difficult to get a grip on. Scientists and students grapple with some fundamental forms of uncertainty as they try to explain phenomena, anchoring cycles of investigation. They have to figure out and discuss:
Uncertainty between phenomenon & investigation
Developing an investigation involves thinking about how tentative ideas and explanations support testable questions, how to represent the phenomena to make progress understanding it, and what to compare. All of these processes involve re-representing something complex and hard to get a grip on in new locations and scales that allow investigators to figure something out. Investigators have to figure out and discuss:
Uncertainty between investigation & evidence
Even once an investigator has planned and begun to carry out an investigation, they have to decide what to pay attention to as evidence and how to record and compare data. This isn’t always obvious and different observers may not see the same result in the same way. They have to figure out and discuss:
Uncertainty between observations & evidence and investigation
As investigations generate observations and evidence, investigators have to work with multiple, noisy, sometimes conflicting data to develop conclusions, determining how to move from individual cases to a set of data, how to organize and represent data, and how and when they can see patterns in light of variability. Investigators have to figure out and discuss:
Uncertainty between investigation & explanation
Finally, there’s substantial uncertainty involved in moving from the results of an investigation to an explanation of a phenomenon. To use results to inform or refine an explanation, the investigator must decide how to generalize from the investigation, grapple with the parts of the phenomenon that the investigation didn’t or couldn’t represent, and consider mechanisms, or why results occurred. They have to figure out and discuss: