Instructions for students:
In order to receive credit from your teacher for this project, you will need to follow his or her directions carefully. This includes any deadlines they may give you as well as any reports they ask you to write.
As well, any descriptive writing you do (meaning not just numbers, graphs or tables) you need to write in complete sentences, using your best spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ALWAYS write in complete thoughts!
If you have access to a word processing program and a printer, it is also recommended that you do your writing using this. Ask your teacher if you can give them your work on a floppy disk or by e-mail. Now how is that for high tech?
1. State the problem in a clear and concise way.
2. Gather information about the topic of your experiment. Use research sites on the internet.
3. Hypothesis is an educated guess about a solution for your problem.
4. The experiment involves several components.
The experimental design is how you will do your experiment. It may involve a visual diagram of your experiment. It will always include a materials section and a procedure section. In the materials section you will list all the items needed to perform your experiment. In the procedure section you should state in order all the steps needed to perform the experiment.
5. Collecting data and analyzing it will involve the use of predesigned tables for writing down the data as you collect it. Graphs are an excellent tool for analyzing data.
6. The conclusion should always be a statement of fact, such as, my hypothesis was or was not supported by the data collected in this experiment.
7. Experimental Errors are any errors that might have occured during the running of the experiment that may have adversily affected the results.
Links to sites on the Scientific Method:
2. Introduction to the Scientific Method
4. Socratic Method and the Scientific Method
5. General Use of the Scientific Method
