Scientific Investigation Terms

Today was a pretty informative day. If you missed it don't worry, just keep reading. Well first things first, observation. An observation is just a description of an item or event. For example, I observed that the ice cream was vanilla with chocolate chips in it, that's an observation. There are two types of observations one of them is called a Quantitative observation. A quantitative observation is observing how much of something there is. Like the vanilla ice cream had 20 chocolate chips on it. But the number has to be precise not like over 10 chocolate chips. The second kind of observation is Qualitative observation which involves your senses (hear, see, etc.). For example the flower smelled sweet and it was yellow. Enough with observations lets move on. The next thing we learned about was inferences. Inferences are conclusions based on evidence about what has occurred or from prior knowledge. Like I inferred her tongue was blue because she was sucking on a lollipop I inferred this because I saw her buy a lollipop. Next we learned about variables which is the part of an experiment that changes. There are two types of variables independent variables (IV) and dependent variable (DV). The IV is something we change on purpose and the DV is the result from the change. The depends on the IV. What I mean by that is say the IV was a flower I put in water with blue coloring dye and the and the blue flower in result of what I did would be the DV. There would have never been a DV if I hadn't put the IV in the blue water. On to constants constants are the factors of an experiment that are kept the same and never change. Like if we were to soak paper towels in water to see which one is more absorbant we wouldn't change the amount of water we soaked each paper towel in because that is a constant. Next is control a control is the part of an experiment that serves as a comparison to the variables. Next we learned about experiments which is a process in which a problem is tested and observations are made in order to find a solution . An experiment would be like if I mixed baking soda and vinegar to see what would happen. Then we learned about data which is facts found as a result of an experiments. Another way to put data is what you record while observing an experiment. Then we learned about line graphs which shows change over time. Here's a page about line graphs http://www.mathgoodies.com/lessons/graphs/line.html . Next we learned about bar graphs which compare 2 or more items. Lastly we learned about a conclusion. A conclusion is a summary of what happened or was learned during an experiments. That was what we learned today. Also all of the worksheets from today are on blackboard.

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