1. Mrs. Spicer

2.  The research question is the most important part of scientific inquiry.  Your experiment is done to answer this question.  Make sure you question can be measured quantitatively, rather than qualitatively.

3.  Use a variety of resources to research your topic.  Research will help you learn about techniques and equipment that can help you carry out your experiment.

4.  A hypothesis is an “educated guess” about the outcome of your experiment.  Your hypothesis will be based on your previous knowledge and the information you obtained during your research.  Your hypothesis should be stated clearly so it can be easily test and answer.

5.  Design an experiment to test your hypothesis.  It must be designed so that you can collect the best data possible to prove or disprove your hypothesis.  Remember to be carefully of all the different variables involved in the experiment – you must only change one thing at a time an keep other things constant.  It is best to perform the experiment more than once.

6.  Collect data.  Make notes of your observations (examples include tables, measurements, graphs etc...).  Analyze your data and make conclusions to answer your initial question.  The conclusion is a summary of your research and the results of the experiment.

7.  Write a report to communicate your results from your experiment to others.  You will be completing lab reports.

8.  Suppose you notice that Mr. Kennedy’s tomoatoes are much larger than Mrs. Spicer’s. You wonder “why?”.

9.  “Is there something in a tomatoe plant’s environment that makes it grown bigger tomatoes?”

10.  Visit your local library, check out the internet etc...  You may discover that tomato plans have certain requirement, such as water, sun, fertilizer etc... that will impact the plant’s ability to grow large tomatoes.

11.  Mr. Kennedy’s tomatoes grew larger because he used a fertilizer.

12.  You decide to conduct an experiment in which you change only one variable – the use of fertilizer – (this is the independent variable).  Your dependent variable will be the size of your tomatoes.  You will control the amount of sunlight, and the amount of water.

13.  For a month, you take daily measurements of the size of the tomatoes, and also record the number of colour of the tomatoes.  After a month, you conclude that the tomatoes grown in the fertilizer were significantally larger.