The Basic Science Process Skills

1. Observing – a basic science process in which you make use of your senses to gather
information about the things and events around you. Through your senses, you can
identify the color, texture, size, or odor of a material. You can take note of the conditions,
you may use a device like a magnifying glass, a microscope, or a telescope. When you use
your senses to give a description of an object of the changes that take place in a given
setup, you are making a qualitative observation.
Imagine yourself coming home from school. You see a pitcher of pineapple juice
inside your refrigerator. The pitcher feels cold as you grasp it. You drink the juice; you
smell the pineapple and enjoy the taste. In this situation you make use of your smelling
and taste senses.

2. Inferring – a logical interpretation of your observation based on experience or prior

knowledge. For instance, when you drank the glass of pineapple juice after coming home
from school, you observed that it was cold. You could infer that it was prepared and
placed in the refrigerator earlier that day or you might think that it had just been made
using cold water or ice. The only way to check which of your inferences is correct is to
further investigate.

3. Predicting – making an “intelligent guess” about the outcome of an experiment or an

event. Prediction is based on observable facts, trends, and patterns. You can either
interpolate or extrapolate. When you interpolate, you base your prediction within the
observed data. When you extrapolate, you go beyond the observed data according to the
pattern that the data show.
After drinking a glass of cold pineapple juice, you left the pitcher of cold juice on
the table for a few minutes. You drunk another glass of juice and noticed that it was not
as cold as the first glass of juice that you took. You predicted that if you would leave the
juice longer in the table, it would start to get warm. So you decided to put the juice back
in the refrigerator.

4. Classifying – looking for common attributes that can help explain how things are related.
When you classify, you need to observe first the objects or events that are to be classified.
Select one feature that is common to these objects or events. Place objects that share a
similar feature in a subgroup. Look for another feature that may be common to the
unclassified objects or events and place them in another subgroup.
When you open your refrigerator, you notice how the different food products are
arranged. There is a place for meat and frozen foods, for bottled products, for beverages,
for dairy products and for fruits and vegetables. This is how food products in the
 refrigerator are classified. Remember that when you classify, you group objects or events
for a purpose.

5. Measuring – determining the size of an object or the amount of a material with the use
of measuring instruments.
Measuring gives a quantitative observation. Measurement can be accurate and/or
precise. Accuracy describes how close a measured value is to the accepted or true value.
Precision describes how close the measured values are to one another.

6. Analyzing – breaking down your observations into their components and seeing their
relationships among them. When you analyze, you look into the details to discover
essential features. To do this, you have to look for patterns in the data and recognize
what the data mean.
For example, if you used thermometer in observing the temperature of the cold
pitcher of juice on top of the table and recorded the temperature every minute, you
would have noticed a pattern that showed increasing temperature.

7. Communication – sharing the results of you experiment or research to others. The results
and findings of a scientific investigation become more useful when shared to the
scientific community. It has been a practice among scientists to report results and
conclusions of their experiments in scientific journals or magazines. Important
information often lead to new experiments and discoveries.