Investigations get started as people see something puzzling or worth explaining. Deciding what about a phenomenon is relevant to understand isn’t obvious, and often relies on knowledge and experience.

Investigations get started as people see something puzzling or worth explaining. Deciding what about a phenomenon is relevant to understand isn’t obvious, and often relies on knowledge and experience.

It often takes work to develop a question that is (a) worthy of further study with an investigation, (b) possible given the time and materials available, and (c) can help you make progress understanding the phenomenon.

Investigations are, at heart, re-representations of complex phenomena in places and at scales that allow us to study them. Scientists have to decide what aspects of the phenomenon to represent and how to represent them, even before they are entirely sure what is important.

Developing an investigation involves deciding what to compare and for what reason. This includes identifying and controlling variables, considering whether a comparison will provide information, and considering scale (e.g. how much to vary a factor to decide if it makes a difference).

Scientists experience uncertainty about what to pay attention to as investigations start to deliver “results.” They have to figure out, and often spend considerable time debating, what forms of evidence are important and not important.

Scientists have to decide how to record and compare attributes, often generating and using a particular scale (e.g. distance, temperature, color, moisture).

Scientists have to specify the attributes they care about and see them in the same way as others. This often includes asking, “What do we mean by...” (e.g., size, force, health) and differentiating or bounding attributes.

Drawing a conclusion or making a claim involves moving from what one person sees on one occasion to comparisons across multiple cases. Scientists have to decide how to combine data or compare with others and how to make sense of conflicting evidence.

Scientists decide how to work with, organize, and sometimes transform data – both so that they can see patterns and so they can help others understand what they see. 

When drawing conclusions and making claims, scientists face uncertainty given the variability inherent in their data; they have to understand the sources of variability, describe patterns in light of variability, and decide when they have enough evidence.

Scientists have to decide how their results do and don’t apply to the phenomenon, making sense of differences such as scale and type of material.

Often, results help scientists identify factors that matter, but they may still be unsure about why or how those factors make a difference. They have to engage in conceptual work and may need to bring other sources of information to bear on their findings.

Scientists take findings from the investigation and use those to develop explanations, often of a more complex process than that tested. 

Explaining involves deciding when you have a good enough explanation, given your evidence and purposes. No explanation covers all details or relevant phenomena- so scientists are constantly evaluating whether their explanation is satisfying and what next questions and related phenomena it points them to.