The science process skills include observing, hypothesizing, ordering, categorizing, comparing, inferring, implying, and communicating. These are all important science skills, and, for the most part, this list goes from easiest to hardest.
If you want to understand one science skill, it’s good to understand the science skills before it. I want to go over all of these and give a brief description of each.
Observing
Observing is pretty self-explanatory—this is being able to write down an accurate description of something observed in nature or something observed in an experiment.
Hypothesizing
Hypothesizing is building off an observation. You take an observation and then you form a prediction based off that observation.
Ordering
Ordering and categorizing are similar because they both have to do with the structure of information. In ordering, you’re taking information and maybe putting it in a list from most important to least important, or you’re putting it in some kind of order to make the information very accessible and very understandable.
Categorizing
Categorizing has to do with taking the information and putting it with other like information so you have different categories of information.
Comparing
Comparing has to do with noticing the similarities between different events or different experiments. This is important because sometimes two experiments or two scientific phenomena will look totally different, but through the skill of comparing, you’ll be able to notice the similarities between the two.
Inferring
Inferring is different than hypothesizing because hypothesizing is making a prediction of something that will happen, whereas inferring is making a conjecture about something that did happen. Hypothesizing is looking forward to a future event, while inferring is looking back to a past event, attempting to explain it from the information already known.
Applying
Applying is taking a prediction and putting it into an experiment. In other words, you’re taking your observation, your hypothesis of what might happen, and actually applying it to an experiment.
Communicating
Finally, we have communicating, which actually goes hand-in-hand with observing because observing is making accurate descriptions of something you have seen. Communicating is taking those observations and being able to communicate or tell that to someone else. That may be by writing a description of it or telling them about it.
This is very important because by being able to communicate information, scientists are able to feed off each other’s discoveries. That’s why it’s important to be able to accurately communicate scientific information.
Those are the science process skills.
