Using a 17th-Century Experiment as a Gateway to Critical Assessment of Scientific Reports

ABSTRACT It is certainly widely appreciated that there is much to be gained in the fertile crosstalk between science and history — whether bringing a historical perspective into the science classroom Wieder, 2006) or a scientific perspective to the study of history (McElvaine, 2002; Smail, 2008). Perhaps the major impetus for using history in teaching science has been to better transmit a sense of how science actually gets done (Conant, 1948; Johnson, 1996). I describe a different approach: using historical materials not from a history-of-science perspective but in actively developing students' analytical abilities with respect to scientific experiment and current scientific reports.