I don't fully get why it is assumed few of us possess the requisite knowledge to speak to what the scientific practice involves?
I'm not assuming it. I have repeatedly found it to be the case; it has been identified as a serious issue by organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publishers of the journal
Science), the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Societies, etc., empirical research into the understanding of the nature of science (NoS) that even those who TEACH science at the pre-college level has repeatedly shown a substantial and serious divergence between how scientists actually practice and how e.g., high school chemistry or physics teachers think they do; study after study has shown that even college textbooks seriously distort, misrepresent, or mislead the reader as to the nature of "The Scientific Method" and the scientific process more generally; the largely ignored literature written by professional scientists attempting to correct serious distortions began shortly after the scientific method (a conception developed by a single individual for educational purposes) and has continued ever since; etc.
One can't really understand how scientists practice unless you have some kind of experience in that field or a similar behind-the-scenes look (this is true even of scientists; it's actually a serious problem in particle physics and climate science, for example, because e.g., experiments in particle physics not only can't be replicated in the standard sense, nobody actually understands them well-enough to enable adequate review of a single experiment, while in climate science the diversity of the relevant systems makes it impossible to become an expert in more than a few). That said, it is certainly possible for anybody to gain a reasonable understanding of scientific practice by reading graduate level textbooks, scientific literature, conference proceedings, etc., and these days even by going to youtube and watching actual sciences talk about their work to other scientists in various panels, sessions, conferences, etc.
The problem is that almost nobody does this except scientists, and the presentation of the nature of science (in particular the scientific method, which strictly speaking is purely a myth and widely recognized as such) is woefully inadequate.
Once doing a scientific experiment, do they not have experience?
They don't. Doing experiments is actually rather misleading, as it hides the inevitable theory-laden nature of real scientific research, the complex relationships between the ways in which theory drives research questions, determines how such questions will be investigated, and how the results are interpreted. People make observations naturally- empirical inquiry requires first and foremost a logical framework and secondly a theoretical framework within which one works.
I struggle to find quotes (online) what 'scientists' think about the scientific method.
I can give you a bunch if you wish:
"[t]here is no such thing as the scientific method. If there were, surely an examination of the history of physics, chemistry and biology would reveal it."
Conant, J. B. (1951).
Science and Common Sense. Yale University Press.
“Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist “than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed ‘steps’ of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in his attempt to understand natural phenomena"
Harvard Committee. (1945).
General education in a free society: Report of the Harvard Committee. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
“Around the middle of the 20th century, the Scientific Method was offered as a template for teachers to emulate for the activity of scientists (National Society for the Study of Education, 1947). It was composed of anywhere from five to seven steps (e.g., making observations, defining the problem, constructing hypotheses, experimenting, compiling results, drawing conclusions). Despite criticism beginning as early as the 1960s, this oversimplified view of science has proven disconcertingly durable and continues to be used in classroom today”
Windschitl, M. (2004). Folk theories of “inquiry:” How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific method.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching,
41(5), 481-512.
“One of the most widely held misconceptions about science is the existence of the scientific method...
The myth of the scientific method is regularly manifested in the belief that there is a recipelike stepwise procedure that all scientists follow when they do science. This notion was explicitly debunked..."
Lederman, N. G., Abd-El-Khalick, F., Bell, R. L., & Schwartz, R. (2002). Views of nature of science questionnaire: Toward valid and meaningful assessment of learners’ conceptions of nature of science
. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39, 497–521
“a focus on practices (in the plural) avoids the mistaken impression that there is one distinctive approach common to all science—a single “scientific method”—or that uncertainty is a universal attribute of science. In reality, practicing scientists employ a broad spectrum of methods, and although science involves many areas of uncertainty as knowledge is developed, there are now many aspects of scientific knowledge that are so well established as to be unquestioned foundations of the culture and its technologies.”
Schweingruber, H., Keller, T., & Quinn, H. (Eds.). (2012).
A Framework for K-12 Science Education:: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. National Academies Press.
"We recognize that critiques of TSM are not new. Rudolph (2005), for example, chronicled the spread of TSM [the scientific method] as a movement that began with a simple five-step heuristic for “logical thinking” developed by John Dewey (1910).During the 20th century, this idea swept through the educational community despite regular admonitions from notable scientists (and Dewey himself) that there was no such thing as “a” scientific method. From a methodological perspective, Bauer (1992) picked apart the notion of a universal method, citing the varied ways in which members of different subdisciplines in science pose questions, acquire data, deal with theory, and argue with evidence. From a curricular perspective, Hodson (1996) traced the changing nature of science inquiry in schools from the 1960s to the present, arguing that movements such as discovery learning, process approaches, and particular forms of constructivist pedagogy have all misrepresented the nature of investigative science.”
Windschitl, M., Thompson, J., & Braaten, M. (2008). Beyond the scientific method: Model‐based inquiry as a new paradigm of preference for school science investigations.
Science education,
92(5), 941-967.
“The “myths of science” discussed here are commonly included in science textbooks, in classroom discourse and in the minds of adult Americans. Misconceptions about science are most likely due to the lack of philosophy of science content in teacher education programs and the failure of such programs to provide real science research experiences for preservice teachers while another source of the problem may be the generally shallow treatment of the nature of science in the textbooks to which teachers might turn for guidance. Some of these myths, such as the idea that there is a scientific method, are most likely caused by the explicit inclusion of faulty ideas in textbooks while others, such as lack of knowledge of the social construction of scientific knowledge, are the result of omissions in texts.”
McComas, W. F. (2002). The principal elements of the nature of science: Dispelling the myths. In W. F. McComas (Ed.)
The Nature of Science in Science Education (
Science & Technology Education Library) (pp. 53-70). Springer.
"The model of ‘scientific method’ that probably reflects many people’s understanding is one of scientific knowledge being ‘proved’ through experiments...That is, the ‘experimental method’ offers a way of uncovering true knowledge of the world, providing that we plan our experiments logically, and carefully collect sufficient data. In this way, our rational faculty is applied to empirical evidence to prove (or otherwise) scientific hypotheses.
This is a gross simplification, and misrepresentation, of how science actually occurs, but unfortunately it has probably been encouraged by the impoverished image of the nature of science commonly reflected in school science." (emphasis added)
Taber, K. S. (2009).
Progressing Science Education: Constructing the Scientific Research Programme into the Contingent Nature of Learning Science (
Science & Technology Education Library Vol. 37). Springer.
"there is no one way to ‘do’ science. Methods and practices vary widely across fields, institutions, and individuals. Even the U.S. National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) asserts, contrary to decades-old school lore, that 'no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science' (National Science Teachers Association, 2000). Amidst this array of approaches to doing science, there exists considerable debate amongst the general public and academics from a range of disciplines about how to characterize scientific inquiry."
Grotzer, T. A., Miller, R. B., & Lincoln, R. A. (2012). Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of Science to Complicate Public Understanding of Science. In M. S. Khine (Ed.).
Advances in Nature of Science Research: Concepts and Methodologies (pp. 27-49). Springer.
“Pre-college students, and the general public for that matter, believe in a distorted view of scientific inquiry that has resulted from schooling, the media, and the format of most scientific reports.
This distorted view is called THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.” (emphasis added)
Lederman, N. G. (1999). EJSE Editorial: The State of Science Education: Subject Matter Without Context.
Electronic Journal of Science Education,
3(2).
“A key myth...is a belief in a universal scientific method. As with many myths, those who hold to it are startled when they discover its inaccuracy; those who know it is a myth are surprised by its persistence in textbooks, curricula, and lesson plans. I've seen teachers become visibly shaken when they learn the scientific method is a myth. I’ve also heard aspirants to a teacher education program say they studied the scientific method in preparation for their application interviews. Somehow the myth of the scientific method lives on and not only within the realm of the science classroom. The persisting mythology of a scientific method is viewed as a problem within educational research (Rowbottom & Aiston, 2006) as well as for those who teach science.”
Settlage, J. (2007). Demythologizing science teacher education: Conquering the false ideal of open inquiry.
Journal of Science Teacher Education,
18(4), 461-467.
“It became fashionable early in the present century to speak of the "scientific method." as though there was a set procedure for doing science which, if followed, was guaranteed to produce results...We have here an apparently simple methodology...that seemingly lends itself well to science education. But the problem with it is that, except for the most straightforward situations offering clear cause-and-effect relationships, the notion that here is a routine for automatically solving any scientific problem is patently false.”
Shamos, M. H. (1995).
The Myth of Scientific Literacy. Rutgers University Press.