Designing and Assessing Scientific Modeling Tasks

Scientists strive to provide causal accounts that explain and predict phenomena. Scientists use models to represent relationships among components to test and explain complex phenomenon. As such, modeling is an integral and common practice across the science disciplines. Scientists continually form, test, evaluate, and revise models to explain and predict phenomena. By testing models against data, scientists evaluate and revise models to better fit the data. When a model can no longer account for the data, the model is revised.

Observations of the natural world motivate the construction of models, which in turn motivate further observations and drive the resulting interpretations. In this way, models become explanations: that is, stipulations of possible cause and effect relations in the phenomenon under investigation. (Penner et al. 1998, p. 430)

Defining Scientific Modeling

The practice of scientific modeling differs significantly from the way models are often thought of and talked...