Study questions Scientific Method Lab

Mount St. Mary's University

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GS 102 Concepts in Science: Biology
Fall 2008

Study questions

The following questions are intended as a guide to help you focus your studying. You must, however, do more than memorize the answers to each of these questions. You need to understand the material and be able to discuss the concepts in your own words. Use active study techniques as much as possible (i.e., you must do more than just read over your answers many times). It may help in reviewing the lab activities to study together with your lab group.

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Introduction to Scientific Method lab
This portion of the exam will test your ability to recognize and develop proper experimental design.

1. Be able to:

list and use the steps of the scientific method

distinguish between scientific and non-scientific questions

tell whether a hypothesis is good or bad; if it is bad, be able to fix it (remember that a hypothesis has to be falsifiable and testable)

2. Be able to identify the following variables in a well-designed experiment:

dependent variable independent variablelevels of treatment of the independent variable (including the appropriate control treatment)

standardized variables

3. Be sure you know how to include proper replication in an experimental design.

4. You may be given a question and/or a hypothesis and asked to design an experiment.

5. You may be given an experiment and asked questions about its design.

6. You may be given data and asked to analyze it, graph it, and draw conclusions from it. You may be asked to calculate an average. You may be asked to apply the concept of standard deviation in drawing conclusions from a set of data. You will not be asked to calculate standard deviation, however.

7. For the experiment the class conducted together, review all of the components of the experimental design detailed in #3-#4. What were our results? What conclusion did we draw from those results? Review your answers to the discussion questions at the end of the lab handout.