Specifically, from where did this stepwise view of scientific epistemology originate, and by what means did it come to be fixed in the public consciousness? In what follows, I trace the emergence of this characterization of scientific work to its source in the early twentieth-century proliferation of secondary education in the United States, and to the city of Chicago, where the members of the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers (CASMT) first convened to discuss what science education should look like at the dawn of the twentieth century and, most importantly, where John Dewey developed his ideas on the place of the scientific method in education-ideas which would form the core of a new portrayal of scientific process in the schools...
This conceptual shift, I argue, was catalyzed by the publication in 1910 of John Dewey's book How We Think, which laid out the familiar steps of what became the popular view of the scientific method and contributed to the redefinition of science as an everyday problem-solving activity...
...none of his discussions of science education clearly laid out what became known as the steps of the scientific method. The work that spelled these out and that was ultimately responsible for reifyimg the five step process in the nation’s classrooms was How We Think, a short textbook for teachers that Dewey described as “an adaptation of a pragmatic logic to educational method.” The book, drawn from his experiences at the laboratory school in Chicago, was his first attempt, given the rapidly changing conditions of the schools, to help teachers “deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass.”6’ In chapter six, Dewey analyzed what he called a “complete act of thought.” Any such act, he wrote, consisted of the following five “logically distinct” steps: “(i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; [and] (v) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection.”
