the scientific method

what is it?

The Scientific Method is all about answering a question. You use this subconsciously all the time whether you know it or not. It starts with an observation: you look at the world around you and you see things. A lot of what you see you don’t understand. In order to understand it, you ask a question based on your observation. Now that you have a question, you attempt to answer the question based on what you see happening and your prior knowledge on the topic. This is your hypothesis. Next, you try to support your hypothesis with evidence. You can do this by running an experiment. This might sound complicated, but trust me, it’s super simple. Once your experiment is over, you have to gather the data from the experiment and figure out what it is telling you. Your experimental data may support your hypothesis or it might not support your hypothesis. Now you can draw a conclusion based on what your results told you. Once you have done this, you can communicate those results to everyone else. You can also try additional experiments that might give you more information than what you gathered from this one.

how does it work?

Here’s an example of this method in action. You pick up a flashlight to use, but it won’t turn on. This is your observation. Now you ask a question: why won’t the flashlight turn on? You can try to answer this by thinking maybe the battery ran out and that’s why the flashlight isn’t working. Now you test this hypothesis by putting in a new battery and trying to turn it on. If the flashlight turns on, then the results of your experiment support your original hypothesis, and you can conclude that the flashlight wasn’t working because the battery was dead. If the flashlight doesn’t turn on, then you will have to come up with a second explanation. For example, maybe the lightbulb burnt out. You can test this by changing the light bulb and seeing if the flashlight works now. Again, if it does, your hypothesis is supported, and if it doesn’t, you will have to come up with a new one. If the flashlight works now, you can conclude that the flashlight wasn’t working because the lightbulb burnt out. Once you have determined the answer, you can communicate your results with others.

why does it matter?

The scientific method is important because it reduces the influence of bias on the results of an experiment. Without the scientific method, there would be no structure in science and people would just be doing things all over the place with no consistency. It would be impossible to determine which conclusions are valid and which are insignificant. Luckily, we do have the scientific method! It allows us to run experiments and collect data in a way that works almost every time and reduces the chance that we will accidentally change the outcome because of what we think should happen. If you have bias towards something, it means you favor it over other things. In science, this bias can be bad because it might influence how our experiments turn out. While scientists still make mistakes even when using the scientific method, it ensures they can easily go back and see what went wrong, and it also encourages us to share our conclusions with others so they can check our results as well.

Sources

Harris, William. “How the Scientific Method Works.” HowStuffWorks Science, HowStuffWorks, 10 Aug. 2018, science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/scientific-method9.htm.

Dickey, Jean L., Reece, Jane B., Simon, Eric J.Taylor, Martha R. Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections, 7th Edition. Pearson, 2012.