HC Scientific Method Quiz

Faculty members at the same school often have different philosophies of how to teach and what tools should be used in the classroom. The chemistry teacher and mathematics teacher get into a discussion one lunchtime about whether or not students should be allowed to use calculators in class. The mathematics teacher believes it slows students down while the chemistry teacher thinks it helps students speed through the basic calculations so they can spend time on other work. The two teachers decide to run an experiment to see who is correct.

They take two groups of students and provide each with the same worksheet of math problems. The first group was not allowed to use calculators while the second group had the option to use a calculator if they needed it.

The control group in this experiment is

Gwendolyn wants to improve her cross-country times and has heard that taking a protein supplement powder dissolved in milk will increase her muscle mass and help her achieve her goal. Gwendolyn finds a supplement she wants to try but it's very expensive. She decides she will buy a small container first and test it to see if it really works before she commits to spending a fortune on a larger can.

Gwendolyn drinks a glass of milk every night for a week and runs a timed mile every day. Then, she adds the protein supplement to her milk the following week and continues to take her mile times. At the end of the two week period, Gwendolyn compares the times from her first and second week.

The experimental set-up is

For their AP Statistics class, a group of students want to determine if the length of time one studies for a test affects the score a student receives. They ask every biology student how long she studied for her last biology test and what score she achieved.

The dependent variable is

In order to investigate the biotic (living) factors in the environment, students in the AP Biology class decide to measure the abiotic (nonliving) factors. In particular, they are interested in the aquatic environments near their school so they measure the temperature of the water in the Potomac River at different depths. They find the temperature at the surface of the river is warm and it slowly gets colder as they measure deeper in the water.

The dependent variable is

An English teacher thinks her students always arrive to class unfocused and chatty. She wonders if she could help them become more attentive by leading them through a quick 1-minute meditation at the beginning of each class.

Since she teaches 4 sections of Junior English, she decides she can use these classes in her study. She continues teaching two classes in the same manner as she had done previously, with no meditation. In the other two classes, she begins each lesson with a brief breathing and visualization exercise.

The experimental set-up in this study is

An AP Psychology student decides to study the impact of withholding affection on pet rats. She builds two cages.

In the first cage, she places two rats that she visits three times each day - at breakfast, at lunch, and at dinner. She takes each rat out of the cage and cuddles it for 5 minutes before returning it to the cage (10 minutes altogether).

In the second cage, she places two rats that she also visits three times a day; however, she does not take either rat out of the cage. Instead, she just sits and watches the rats for 10 minutes.

After two weeks of recording the rats' behaviors, she notices a pattern in her data. The rats that she cuddles each day finish all the food she gives them. The rats that do not receive affection have reduced their food intake by half.

The experimental set-up in this experiment is

Marianne wants to see if there is any truth to the supposed healing qualities of chicken soup. She decides that each time a friend gets a cold over the course of winter, she will use her as a test subject. She decides to alternate the treatment. All odd-numbered test subjects (Person 1, Person 3, Person 5, and so on) are not given soup. All even-numbered test subjects (Person 2, Person 4, Person 6, and so on) are given chicken soup for lunch every day from the onset of their cold symptoms.

What is the control set-up in this experiment?

Sandy has noticed that every time she wears make-up, her eyes become very itchy. She thinks she might be allergic to one of the beauty products she uses. To try to determine which product is responsible, she decides to investigate each product, one at a time.

Sandy starts with her mascara. She keeps all her make-up the same for a full week but alternates which days she wears mascara: on Monday, she wears mascara, on Tuesday she goes without, on Wednesday she wears mascara, and so on. Each day, Sandy notes how often she scratches her eyes.

The control set-up is

As her science fair project, a student wanted to test how the mass of a maple tree fruit (the 'helicopter' seed) affected the distance it could travel from the parent tree.

She collected 200 fruits and sorted them into 3 mass groups: light, medium, and heavy. She marked the light fruits with a blue marker dot, the medium fruits with a yellow marker dot, and the heavy fruits with a red marker dot. Then, she climbed the balcony at the back of the gym and, one-by-one) dropped each fruit. She measure how far each fruit had traveled out from her starting point and noted its mass group.

The independent variable is

Janey's mother has told Janey she is not allowed to put her field hockey shin guards in the car unless she can get rid of their foul sweaty smell. Janey complains about this to her teammates who give her many different suggestions for what she can do to get rid of the smell.

Janey purchases six different disinfectant sprays that could kill the bacteria feeding on her sweat and creating the smell, and decides to use a different one each day and see if her mother notices a 'shin guard' smell.

The dependent variable is

Patricia promised her soccer team that she would bring them cupcakes to the game the next day; however, she forgot!! It is now 11:00 p.m. and she needs to make 60 cupcakes by the morning. The cupcake mixture box says each batch of 12 cupcakes (5 batches) will take twenty minutes to bake at 180 oC. That would be a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes. Patricia's mum will not allow her to stay up past midnight. Patricia guesses that if she increases the oven temperature, the cupcakes will cook more quickly, so she decides to test her first batch by baking them at double the temperature (360 oC) for half the time (10 minutes).

The independent variable in this experiment is

A Holy Child junior student applies for and is accepted to work at an internship at the National Institutes of Health over the summer. The scientist who heads her lab is studying the impact of a specific drug on how quickly tumor cells reproduce.

The independent variable is