1. How can we ask the best questions?
Asking Questions
How can we ask the best questions?

2. Asking Scientific Questions
Able to be addressed by science
Testable & not too broad
Unbiased;: consider many possible explanations and alternate hypotheses
Goals
Description
Prediction
Understanding
Mechanisms
Answer “Why?”
Cause & Effect Relationship

3. Cause & Effect Covariation of events Time order relationships
Elimination of plausible alternative causes
Experimental manipulation
Cause & Effect

4. Serendipity
Deduction
Induction
Inuition
Analogy
Asking quesitons

5. Asking Questions: Thought
Analogy
► comparing similar situations
Induction
► infer general from specific
Deduction
► infer specific from general
Intuition
► ‘hunch’, little concrete info
Serendipity
► unexpected observation
Asking Questions: Thought

6. Designing Experiments to Ask Good Questions
“Since a major goal of science is to minimize the difference between our perception of reality and reality itself, the primary focus of experimental design is to make the test as objective as possible.”
Lee

7. Planning Experiments Choose type and amount of data What to observe
How to observe - direct, indirect, inference
How to collect data
Design: controls, treatments, types of & which variables
Choose data analysis

8. Bias & Errors Types of Bias Experimental Error Sampling Psychological:
subject, experimenter
Types of Bias
Systematic: e.g. calibration
Unsystematic:
e.g. uncontrolled factors
Personal errors: judgment
Mistakes: e.g. recording
Experimental Error
Bias & Errors

9. At presentations
Reading papers
Doing research
Asking questions…

10. At presentations
Reading papers
Doing research
Asking questions…

11. At presentations
Reading papers
Doing research
Asking questions…