Slide 1

Mrs. Spicer

Slide 2

The research question is the most important part of scientific inquiry. Your experiment is done to answer this question. Make sure you question can be measured quantitatively, rather than qualitatively.

Slide 3

Use a variety of resources to research your topic. Research will help you learn about techniques and equipment that can help you carry out your experiment.

Slide 4

A hypothesis is an educated guess about the outcome of your experiment. Your hypothesis will be based on your previous knowledge and the information you obtained during your research. Your hypothesis should be stated clearly so it can be easily test and answer.

Slide 5

Design an experiment to test your hypothesis. It must be designed so that you can collect the best data possible to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Remember to be carefully of all the different variables involved in the experiment you must only change one thing at a time an keep other things constant. It is best to perform the experiment more than once.

Slide 6

Collect data. Make notes of your observations (examples include tables, measurements, graphs etc...). Analyze your data and make conclusions to answer your initial question. The conclusion is a summary of your research and the results of the experiment.

Slide 7

Write a report to communicate your results from your experiment to others. You will be completing lab reports.

Slide 8

Suppose you notice that Mr. Kennedys tomoatoes are much larger than Mrs. Spicers. You wonder why?.

Slide 9

Is there something in a tomatoe plants environment that makes it grown bigger tomatoes?

Slide 10

Visit your local library, check out the internet etc... You may discover that tomato plans have certain requirement, such as water, sun, fertilizer etc... that will impact the plants ability to grow large tomatoes.

Slide 11

Mr. Kennedys tomatoes grew larger because he used a fertilizer.

Slide 12

You decide to conduct an experiment in which you change only one variable the use of fertilizer (this is the independent variable). Your dependent variable will be the size of your tomatoes. You will control the amount of sunlight, and the amount of water.

Slide 13

For a month, you take daily measurements of the size of the tomatoes, and also record the number of colour of the tomatoes. After a month, you conclude that the tomatoes grown in the fertilizer were significantally larger.