Scientific Tasks

  • Tasks that help learners understand how science works
  • Tasks that involve scientific enquiry or the scientific method or research.

 

Tips

What does a scientific task look like? It would include:

  • making hypotheses based on an understanding of background information provided by on- or off-line sources;
  • testing the hypotheses by gathering data from pre-selected sources;
  • determining whether the hypotheses were supported and describing the results and their implications in the standard form of a scientific report.

The key to making a successful WebQuest of this type is to find questions that can be addressed by the kinds of data available online, that are not so arcane that they cannot be related to the standard science curriculum, and are not so well known that crunching the numbers becomes an exercise in going through the motions.

Examples

Adapted from Bernie Dodge's WebQuest Taskonomy: A Taxonomy of Tasks