Forensic science is developed outside the classroom as a tool to investigate crime scenes. It contains subjects related to chemistry, physics, biology and technology. The approach in forensic science is an inquiry based approach. Forensic scientists have to work with different types of investigation and gather and record data from different sources found on the crime scene (and on the victim). In many cases there is not directly a 100% solution available. With the use of different techniques and different types of evidence, the researcher can state how likely it is that a certain crime was
committed by the suspect. The forensic researcher has to be open minded and be
aware not to use a tunnel vision.
All these aspects make forensic science very suitable to be used as an IBSE
approach in education.
The activities in this subunit 2 address the same abilities as the former one, but at a higher level. The students also see that there are more possible solutions for one problem and that there are different ways to find this solution. Besides that, students have more opportunity to do open inquiry (compared to the first unit).
The abilities addressed in this unit are:
- Asking and answering questions.
- Planning and conducting simple investigations.
- Employing tools to gather data.
- Using data to construct reasonable explanations.
- Communicating investigations and explanations.
- Understanding that scientists use different kinds of investigations and tools to develop
explanations using evidence and knowledge.