What is Science?

Observation of Everything in the

Universe

Step 1

From the

Incredibly

Large

To the IncrediblySmall

And Everything in Between

And Everything in Between

Observation requires ALL

the senses!

Sometimes your senses are not good enough, so you need HELP

Help comes in

many shapes

It is not enough to just observe things, you must

UNDERSTAND

and EXPLAIN

what

you observe.

Step 2

Thinking about Your

Observations

To do this, you

must move to Step 2

To understand, you must think about how what you observedrelates to:

• what you know

• what you learn

• what you feel, and

• everything else you have experienced in your life

AS YOU THINK, ASK QUESTIONSWhy does this happen?What makes it happen?

How can I explain what I observe?Does what I observe make sense compared to

what I know? If not, why not? If I change something, will what I observe

change?And any other question you can think of.

Learn everything you can about what you observed. This is

called

Preliminary Research–Library

• Books• Magazines• Encyclopedia• Photographs• Newspapers• Computer resources

This also includes

Talking to people, and

Anything else that might help you understand and explain your observations

Step 3

Step 4

Form a

HYPOTHESIS

A HYPOTHESISis

An

EDUCATEDGUESS

That explains you observations or answers the questions you have about it.

Step 5

TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS

To see if it is right or wrong

This can be done many ways!

• Make more observations of the same thing to see if it always happens in the same way.

• Create experiments – change just one thing and see if what happens is different – then change a different thing and see if what happens is different.

Sometimes your experiments will go well and tend to prove your

hypothesis.

Just as I predicted!

Sometimes, the experiment doesn’t turn out as you expected and you

have to start over!

Back to the drawing board!

Yikes! We really need a new hypothesis!

Step 6• Even if your Hypothesis is

supported by your further observation or experiments, you should do even more observations and experiments to be sure you get the same results every time.

• If you do, move to step 7

Step 7 - Conclusions

• After you do repeated experiments (trials) and analyzing the results, you reach conclusions– Do my data support or refute my hypothesis?

• If they support my hypothesis is there enough support to publish the results? Did I make any mistakes or leave any variables uncontrolled?

• If they refute my hypothesis, back to the drawing board.