What is the difference between a question and a hypothesis?
A question follows from an interesting observation and the hypothesis is an educated guess or answer to that question.
After deciding to subject bean seeds to different amounts of water (1 ml, 5 ml, 10 ml) a lab technician is tasked with measuring the length of bean roots once a week. What is this experiment's dependent variable?
The length of the bean seed roots.
You have finished an experiment, gathered all your data, analyzed all the data using EXCEL, and you have come up with a conclusion. What's next?
Communicate your results.
After observing a phenomena and asking a question about it, a scientist could research that question and then they would ___________ and _______________.
Come up with their own hypothesis and design their own experiment.
A scientist analyzes her data and says, "We gotta start this miserable experiment all over again." What is she doing?
Drawing a conclusion.
An experiment that tests only one factor at a time by using a comparison of a control group and an experimental group is?
A controlled experiment
In scientific experimentation, what does it mean to replicate or have replication?
You have more than one test subject per treatment (4 sheep) or you repeat the experiment more than once in order to determine how correct the results are.
After observing phenomena and asking a question about it, a scientist could propose a hypothesis, or they could ___________.
Research their question to see if someone else has already done a scientific study to answer it.
A middle school student wants to know if microwaving mouse food for a certain amount of time (1 min, 5 min, 10 min) will make mice stronger. What is his independent variable?
The amount of time the mouse food is microwaved.
What is a placebo? When is it used?
A placebo is a dose of "fake" medicine. It is given to the control group in a double blind experiment. Typically, these experiments test therapeutics.
A scientist has recorded whale sounds. What is he doing if he calculates the average length of each whale sound he recorded?
He is analyzing data.
What is qualitative data?
Qualitative data can be observed and recorded. This data type is non-numerical in nature.
An experiment with plants is testing the effect of increasing amounts of water and increasing sunlight availability. Why is this a bad experiment?
It has more than one independent variable. You will not know if it was the sunlight or the water that caused growth.
When you place one of these in your scientific paper, what are you doing?
Communicating your results.
In an experiment, the one variable that is changed, manipulated, experimented with, or decided upon by the researcher, is called the
Independent Variable
Is this a rule of the scientific method?
"Your hypothesis must be testable."
Yes! Your hypothesis MUST be testable.
A scientist who wants to study the affects of fertilizer on plants sets up an experiment. Plant A gets no fertilizer, Plant B gets 5 mg. of fertilizer each day, and Plant C gets 10mg. of fertilizer each day. Which plant is the control group
Plant A is the experimental control because it gets NO fertilizer.
An experimental control is the ABSENCE of what you are testing. You need it for comparison.
When making a hypothesis, should you just restate the question?
For example, "Does increasing the heat make seeds germinate faster?"
Written as "Will more heat make germination happen quicker?"
Nope! Don't do this! Use an "if than" statement or a null hypothesis.
Bob and Mary are experimenting with paper helicopters. They decided to cut the wings to see if speed can be increased. Bob drops his control aircraft from a chair. Mary is on the floor and dropping the experimental design. What's wrong?
They don't have good controlled variables. Both aircraft should be dropped from the same height.
What is quantitiative data?
Data that has a number associated with it. Such as inches, centimeters, seconds, ect.
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