Scientific Reasoning

What is science? What do scientists do?

In the end, science comes down to a pretty simple sequence: Propose a question and a
reasoning for what you expect to happen, measure or observe, and see how what you
found matches what you expected. Sometimes things don’t match, and you have to
re-evaluate the way you thought something worked.
Like professional athletes, skilled tradespeople, and many other professions, there are
ways of thinking that are critical to successful scientific inquiry. In this lesson, you’ll learn
the basics of scientific reasoning.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
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Identify and describe the philosophical assumptions and limitations of scientific reasoning


Describe and apply the scientific method of reasoning including basic techniques such as
positive and negative experimental controls, drawing conclusions from data, and
accounting for uncertainty
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Differentiate among facts, hypotheses, theories, and predictions
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Apply critical thinking and scientific reasoning to evaluate claims


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Distinguish between dependent and independent variables and identify relationships
between them
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The human brain is the root of scientific observation and experimentation. Our brains
process massive amounts of information constantly and have developed complex pattern
recognition abilities which allow our minds to take short cuts.
How reliable do you think your eyes and ears are in making observations? 1 is completely
unreliable and 10 is completely reliable.
Eyes:

As you’ve seen, our senses and minds work against us, clouding our observations and
data. To counter this, one thing scientists strive for isobjectivity - observations and
measurements which are not based on emotion or opinion, but the same for all observers:
facts, in other words.

Another way of countering bias is by using multiple people to make and check
observations, a process calledpeer review. In this way, the biases of each observation
sort of “cancel out.”
Shown to the right are all the choices made by your class about what they saw in the
basketball video. If you are one of the first students to complete this exercise, it may be
empty, however, think about what answers will look like as more entries are shown.
There was a white hat, white shoes, and a dancing bear - every other choice was not
actually present

The actual value of the mass of the object, called a 聽 calibration mass, is 250.0 g.

Balance 1 was affected most by random error - error without a specific cause or pattern.
How might you account for this error?

Balace 2 systematic error

Another way of thinking about error in measurement is two often used terms: accuracy
and precision.
An accurate measurement is one which is very close to the actual or accepted value of
the measurement.
A precise measurement is one which is very close to other measurements made of the
same object.

HE L P
DESIGN

Experimental Design
With error and bias skewing your observations and data at every turn, you’ll need a way of
designing experiments and accounting for the untrustworthy nature of your instruments,
both mechanical and biological. This is the oft-referred toscientific method.
Often reduced to a poster in classrooms with a set of steps to follow, like the one shown at
right, the scientific method of inquiry is actually a way to reduce the amount of
uncertainty about a problem rather than a set of steps to follow blindly.

Click “next” to send this linear, step-by-step version of the scientific

method to its justified and inevitable doom.

HE L P
DESIGN

Experimental Design
With error and bias skewing your observations and data at every turn, you’ll need a way of
designing experiments and accounting for the untrustworthy nature of your instruments,
both mechanical and biological. This is the oft-referred toscientific method.

Many students learn early on that a hypothesis is “an educated guess”.

A guess is defined as “an opinion that one reaches or to which one commits oneself on
the basis of probability alone or in the absence of any evidence whatsoever”
(dictionary.com)
In the scientific process you examined earlier, hypotheses came from
observations which came from prior experiments. Is a hypothesis, then,
best defined as an educated guess?

Good hypotheses propose explanations and predict outcomes of experiments based on

prior, often limited, knowledge. Hypotheses can also be described as assumption-driven
informed predictions.
Which of the options below would therefore be a good hypothesis for an experiment
seeking to determine what color of light plants grow best under? (You already know that
light is necessary and that there is a difference in how they grow depending on color of
light.)
One part of the scientific method of inquiry is identifying variables in an experiment. In
general, a good experiment has at least one dependent variable, which changes based
on anindependent variable.
For example, if you were to measure the number of cars passing a point on the road each
day for a week, the dependent variable would be the number of cars, and the independent
variable would be the day of the week. In short, the number of cars on the road depends
on what day of the week it is. The day of the week definitely doesn’t depend on the
number of cars on the road!

Not all variables are dependent or independent, though. When designing an experiment,
it’s important to havecontrolled variables, or variables that are held constant or
unchanging. In an experiment, you want to be certain that the effects you are seeing are
only the result of changing one variable at a time. Which of the following are variables that
should be held constant during an experiment counting cars on the highway at various
times of the day?

Some experiments also have what are called controls. These controls are used to ensure
that the experiment is giving the data expected. A positive control is a sample or
measurement that is expected to show some sort of result, while a negative control is a
sample or measurement that is expected to show no result.

In my opinion science is organized and systematic knowledge about natural

and social phenomena, through study and research in order to answer
questions, using real evidence and on the basis of prior knowledge