An example of the scientific method

The following example is something that can be done by a small number of students just about anywhere.

The problem: Boys and girls have different responses to many thing. Can we measure the difference in reaction time of boys and girls physical reflexes?

Gather information: By looking online we found that some experiments show a measurable difference between boys and girls. Some do not.

Hypothesis: We believe that there is a measurable difference in the reactions of boys and girls.

Design an experiment: Two things we have in the classroom are students and a meterstick. We do the experiment in the following steps -

• One student will hold the meterstick upright, by the top while another student holds their hand open with their fingers on either side of the stick.
• When the first student drops the stick, the second catches it
• A third student records the distance from the top of the stick to the place where the student caught it.
• After three tries, a student of the opposite sex gets a chance.

Analyze the data: We made a chart showing each of the three tries by each student. Girls results were recorded in one color and the boys in another. We compared the two sets of numbers as well as the change in the distance over the three tries.

Our conclusion: Our results showed that there was a difference between how fast boys and girls react to the dropping stick. Also, we saw that there was a difference in how fast the two groups learned to shortened the distance. So, our conculsion There is a measurable difference in reactionto this stimuli based on sex.