Slide One: - Weebly



Working like a scientist is easy! All you have to do is memorize this sentence:

Queen Olivia’s Ice Has Everyone’s Drink Cold.

Each step of scientific inquiry corresponds to the first letter of each word in the sentence. These letters also represent the first letter of each word involved in scientific inquiry!!

Now, what do those words really stand for when we are talking about scientific inquiry?

The first step of Scientific Inquiry is:

• Pose a QUESTION

• Scientists usually begin an investigation with a QUESTION about something that is

UNEXPLAINED

• Ex: DOES THE SHAPE OF ICE AFFECT HOW QUICKLY THE ICE MELTS?

After they pose this question, scientists make OBSERVATIONS and INFERENCES

• Observations involve using one or more of your SENSES to gather information.

• Examples of Observations: CLEAR ICE, VOLUME OF ICE, SMOOTH ICE

• Inferences are interpretations (or ASSUMPTIONS) based on observations and prior knowledge.

• Examples of Inferences: THE CLEAR ICE WAS MADE FROM WATER.

The fourth step of Scientific Inquiry is to develop a HYPOTHESIS

• A hypothesis is a POSSIBLE EXPLANATION for a set of observations or an

• ANSWER to a scientific question. It must be something that can be TESTABLE

• After a hypothesis is tested once, it must be tested several other times to make sure the results

are CONSISTENT

• Example of a hypothesis: IF I CAHNGE THE SHAPE OF ICEN, THEN THE TIME OF MELTING WILL NOT CHANGE.

The fifth step of Scientific Inquiry is to design an EXPERIMENT

• VARIABLES – all the factors that could affect the OUTCOME of an experiment

• MANIPULATED VARIABLE – the factor that scientists change

(Ex: THE SHAPE OF ICE

• CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT – one in which there is only ONE manipulated variable and all other

variables are kept CONSTANT

While conducting an experiment, scientists collect DATA (the sixth step of Scientific Inquiry)

• DATA – facts, figures and other evidence collected in an experiment. Data come in the forms of

DESCRIPTIONS or MEASUREMENTS

• Once all the data have been collected, scientists need to interpret, or FIND MEANING OF these

data. Interpreting data involves looking for PATTERNS or trends.

• Data can be displayed in:

DIAGRAMS TABLES GRAPHS

The last step of Scientific Inquiry is drawing CONCLUSION

• After all data are interpreted, scientists are ready to draw a conclusion.

• Sometimes the data will SUPPORT the hypothesis.

• Sometimes it will show the hypothesis is INCORRECT and that’s OK. Eliminating a hypothesis is as important as proving it.

• Sometimes NO CONCLUSION can be reached. This means that scientists need to

DESIGN MORE EXPERIMENTS to gather more data.

• Usually any findings will lead to a NEW QUESTION and a new experiment!!

• The conclusion should be in PARAGRAPH form and include:

o Explain the PROBLEM/QUESTION (Don’t just restate it!)

o Restate the HYPOTHESIS

o Explain how you conducted the EXPERIMENT and include a summary of the DATA

o State if the HYPOTHESIS was correct or not correct

o Predict the next QUESTION that could be tested

•

Ice Cubes

Q Does the shape of an ice cube affect how quickly it melts?

E Freeze the same amount of water into two different shapes. Place each block of ice on identical surfaces and expose them to identical sources of heat for the same amount of time. Observe measure and record the amount of liquid in the container every five minutes.

O/I The clear ice is made of pure water.

H If I change the shape of ice, then the time of melting will not change.

C In my experiment I was testing to determine if the shape of ice affects the melting speed of the ice. I hypothesized that the shape would not affect the speed of melting. The experiment was conducted 5 times. The long rectangular shaped ice melted an average of 4 minutes before the square block. This data does not support my hypothesis. I will continue this experiment with larger volumes of ice in the same shapes.

|Shape of ice |mL/1 minute |mL/2 minutes |mL/3 minutes |mL/4 minutes |

|square |3 mL |9 mL |18 mL |20 mL |

|rectangular |5 mL |10 mL |20 mL |25 mL |

D

-----------------------

• Ex: In my experiment I was testing to determine if the shape of ice affects the melting speed of the ice. I hypothesized that the shape would not affect the speed of melting. In this experiment we tested a rectangular block of ice and a cube block of ice with the same volumes and under the same conditions. The long rectangular shaped ice melted an average of 4 minutes before the square block. This data does not support my hypothesis. I will continue this experiment with larger volumes of ice in the same shapes to see if that will make a difference in melting rate.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download