LABORATORY	The Scientific Method
OVERVIEW	In this laboratory, students will learn how to analyze data, form a hypothesis and test it using data provided by the web page.
OBJECTIVES	At the completion of this laboratory, you should be able to: identify the steps of the scientific process form and test a hypothesis explain what is meant by a correlation between two variables read a bar graph with two variables
INTRODUCTION	The scientific method is the process that all scientists use to make new discoveries. You may then think that the scientific method is a process that scientists use to try to prove something. Rather, the scientific method is used by scientists to disprove their original idea or hypothesis. A hypothesis is a statement that you are going to test. If other scientists cannot disprove a hypothesis using the same process it may then become a theory. A theory that has been around a long time may be called a law (such as the law of gravity). The scientific method has several parts that need to be done in order. The first part is observation. Observation can occur when you watch something and notice a pattern. For example, my friends who live with their grandmother are usually nice to older people. The second part is forming a hypothesis. In forming a hypothesis, you try to explain what you have noticed. For example, a young person living with a grandparent learns to respect older people. The next step is to set up an experiment to try to disprove the hypothesis. In this example, you may make a survey of young people who live with their grandparents and ask them if they respect older people. If most of the people you survey do not, then you have disproved your hypothesis. Disproving your hypothesis is not bad nor wrong. It is a very important part of the scientific method. Many research scientists spend years testing a hypothesis only to find out that it was incorrect. The next step, then, is to modify your hypothesis. Now that you have performed the experiment, think about what you could change in your hypothesis and try setting up an experiment to test this new hypothesis. Finally, draw a conclusion about your results. Your conclusion does not have to be very complicated, it just needs to explain your results and whether or not you have proven your hypothesis.
MATERIALS	A computer with the LinkAge 2000 web page loaded
EXERCISE	In this experiment, we are going to follow the scientific method to try and make a conclusion about students’ views on the elderly (people over 65). Make sure you do not jump ahead and do the experiment before you are ready.
PROCEDURE	Your teacher will load up the survey portion of the LinkAge 2000 web page. Under the section Contact With the Elderly, there are two questions we are going to look at: "How many of the elderly you know are physically active?" and "How many of the elderly you know enjoy life?" The possible responses to each question are "All," "Most," "Some," "Few" or "None." First, we are going to form a hypothesis. Think about the elderly that you know. How many are physically active? How many enjoy life? Then respond to this question: Do you think that physically active older adults are more likely to enjoy life than non-physically active older adults? Your teacher will now run the graphing program for you to see the results. Look at the graph and describe what you see in the space provided: Decide if your hypothesis was right. If it was, write your conclusion below, otherwise write a new hypothesis below:
CONCLUSION	After finishing the experiment, you may find that most of the people who responded a certain way to the first question also responded in a certain way to the second question. This means that there is a correlation between these two responses. You may not know what causes this correlation, but you know there is definitely some sort of relation. You have also learned how to follow the scientific process. Your teacher may have you try the experiment again in a few weeks to see if you get the same results.