The Steps of The Scientific Method
(from PressBooks - Principles of Learning and Behavior)
Your group will be assigned a step in the Scientific Method. Use the Google Classroom form that was shared with you to summarize the step in your own words. You will then create a brief presentation in Google Slides or Keynote that will be presented to the class.
Step 1
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Step 2
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Step 3
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Step 4
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Step 0
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To study the world around us you have to wonder about it. This inquisitive nature is the hallmark of critical thinking, or our ability to assess claims made by others and make objective judgments that are independent of emotion and anecdote and based on hard evidence, and required to be a scientist.
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Step 1
Generate a research question or identify a problem to investigate.
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Through our wonderment about the world around us and why events occur as they do, we begin to ask questions that require further investigation to arrive at an answer. This investigation usually starts with a literature review, or when we conduct a literature search through our university library or a search engine such as Google Scholar to see what questions have been investigated already and what answers have been found, so that we can identify gaps or holes in this body of work.
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Step 2
Attempt to explain the phenomena we wish to study.
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We now attempt to formulate an explanation of why the event occurs as it does. This systematic explanation of a phenomenon is a theory and our specific, testable prediction is the hypothesis. We will know if our theory is correct because we have formulated a hypothesis which we can now test.
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Step 3
Test the hypothesis.
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It goes without saying that if we cannot test our hypothesis, then we cannot show whether our prediction is correct or not. Our plan of action of how we will go about testing the hypothesis is called our research design. In the planning stage, we will select the appropriate research method to answer our question/test our hypothesis.
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Step 4
Interpret the results.
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With our research study done, we now examine the data to see if the pattern we predicted exists. We need to see if a cause and effect statement can be made, assuming our method allows for this inference. The statistics we use take on two forms. First, there are descriptive statistics which provide a means of summarizing or describing data and presenting the data in a usable form. You likely have heard of the mean or average, median, and mode. Along with standard deviation and variance, these are ways to describe our data. Second, there are inferential statistics which allow for the analysis of two or more sets of numerical data to determine the statistical significance of the results. These techniques include the z-test, t-test, ANOVA, and regression., to name a few. Significance is an indication of how confident we are that our results are due to our manipulation or design and not chance. Typically, we set this significance at no higher than 5% due to chance.
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Step 5
Draw conclusions carefully.
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We need to accurately interpret our results and not overstate our findings. To do this, we need to be aware of our biases and avoid emotional reasoning so that they do not cloud our judgment. How so? In our effort to stop a child from engaging in self-injurious behavior that could cause substantial harm or even death, we might overstate the success of our treatment method.
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Step 6
Communicate our findings to the larger scientific community.
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Once we have decided on whether our hypothesis is correct or not, we need to share this information with others so that they might comment critically on our methodology, statistical analyses, and conclusions. Sharing also allows for replication or repeating the study to confirm its results. Communication is accomplished via scientific journals, conferences, or newsletters.
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