Biology - The Scientific Method

this is the end today we'll be discussing the scientific method there's several steps to the scientific method that we will be going over so really what the scientific method is it's just a way to answer a question is all that it is we use the scientific method all the time you might not think you're using the scientific method but whenever you have a question that you're trying to figure out the answer to you really are using the scientific method you may not think of the steps we're going to go through but in some form you really are using the scientific method so let's start by looking at what the steps are to this method so step one means that you're being aware of the world around you you're making observations you may come up with a problem that you notice so there is it could be anything you might go to turn on your television and you notice that it's not working so that might be a problem that you're having and then you would go about trying to figure that problem out and just something simple like that you're using the scientific method so a hypothesis is sometimes you hear it referred to as an educated guess and that's fine but it's basically an explanation that can be tested you hear a called an educated guess because a lot of times the guest you come up with has a reason behind it you're not just making a guess out of nowhere you're you know if your TV doesn't turn on you might say oh my hypothesis is probably the remote control needs batteries you know and then you would test that hypothesis so hypothesis is something that is able to be tested it's your guess as to how to solve the problem so once you make your hypothesis you want to test if it's correct so this is where we come to the experiment the experiment actually will have a couple things we're going to discuss with an experiment because there's several parts that makes a good experiment in science so when you're doing an experiment let's say for example your problem that you wanted to solve was you wanted to figure out that if you didn't eat breakfast would it cause you to eventually lose weight and let's say you make a hypothesis you could say whatever you want if your hypothesis you could say yes I think not eating breakfast will cause weight loss or you can say the opposite your hypothesis you set up an experiment so in your experiment you would ideally need to have two groups you would want to have an experimental group so that would be a group of people that actually does not eat breakfast for let's say a week and so that's what you're trying to experiment on the other group you would also need to have this called a control group a control group is the group that is eating breakfast they're the ones that you're going to compare the experiment to this is a very important group in science because you need to have that comparison if you don't have it and let's say you only have this group and let's say they do lose weight you really don't know if that would have happened anyway so you have to have a control group in order to compare the two groups together so the experimental would be doing the experiment the control group would really not be doing the experiment but you have to compare the two together for your results you also want to think about these two aspects in regards to your experiment the independent variable is whatever you are testing this is a very very important piece of an experiment you want to only have one independent variable so if we're still going to go with the the test that we're doing that not eating breakfast causes weight loss the only variable we would want to have is that those students did not eat breakfast that's what we're testing so you need to make sure that other labels are regulated so you need to make sure that all the students would be exercising the same amount that all the students are eating the same thing for lunch and dinner because the only variable we are testing is whether not eating breakfast causes weight loss that would be the independent variable it's what we're testing the dependent variable is what happens because of the independent variable so for example if the students all lost an average of 5 pounds by not eating breakfast that would be the dependent variable it's what happened because they didn't eat breakfast so once you do your experiment you're going to accumulate some results in data and you can express your data in several ways one way is called quantitatively which means by numbers usually this would be set up in a chart or a graph to make it easier to read here's just an example of some quantitative data just showing the the chart that makes this a little bit easier to display the numbers and read and here's another example of quantitative just now in a pie chart you can also express your data qualitatively which is just expressing it in words and sometimes you'll do a mix of both depending on how you think the best way to get the point across tis okay and the fifth piece is going to be the conclusion and this wraps up the scientific method and really what your conclusion needs to state is if your hypothesis was correct so if your hypothesis was not correct that's what you would state in your conclusion my hypothesis was not correct whatever happened but the thing you do not want to do in your conclusion is make a new hypothesis that's what you would do when you started this process over again so and that's a problem that's I run into a lot with students so your conclusion is just saying whether your hypothesis was correct or whether it was not correct and this concludes our discussion on the scientific method

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Keywords: chs, biology, the, scientific, method, instructional, videos

Id: HdENszxwmCA

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2009