Middle school students develop scientific skills through both formal and informal experiences, especially laboratory work which helps them acquire skills like observation, exploration, investigation, data handling, and project work. Effective science teaching provides structured practical activities using readily available materials to help students learn to observe, ask questions, and draw conclusions. Exploratory and investigative work also allows students to clarify ideas, make direct observations of the world, and understand scientific processes. At this level, students should analyze and reflect on experiments to interpret results and draw conclusions, and present their work in various formats like scripts, visuals, and reports to build scientific skills and comprehension.

1. A SHORT NOTE ON SCIENCE PRACTICAL WORK AT MIDDLE SCHOOL LEVEL
Lalt Kishore
Children develop scientific skills, attitudes, knowledge and understanding through
both formally organised and informal exploratory experiences at the middle school
level. The laboratory experiences help children to acquire the requisite scientific
skills.
The scientific skills include:
o Observations
o Explorations
o •Investigations and finding out
o Data and information handling
o Research from secondary sources
o Discussion and interpretation
o Project work with planning, recording, presenting and reporting
o Improvised models
For effective teaching and learning of science, the teacher is to facilitate acquisition
of these skills. At the middle school level, it is advisable that through practical
experiences with structured activities with the readily available materials be provided
to students. Through practical work, the students learn to observe, raise questions
and draw conclusions.
Similarly the exploratory and Investigative work helps students in the following tasks
• Clarifying ideas
• Making the direct and first hand sense of the world around them
• Getting a feel for the processes of science
Therefore, at the middle school level, students should be given the opportunity to
analyse and reflect on their observations, experiments, models, explorations and
investigations and interpret them to draw conclusions.
Furthermore, students should be afforded opportunities to present their work in a
number of ways, through scripts, visuals, drawings, tables and charts and written
reports. Thus, they will be able to develop the required scientific skills and
understanding of the scientific processes.