What is Science?

1. What is Science?

2. The Goal of Science • to investigate and understand the natural world • To explain events in the natural world • To use those explanations to make useful predictions

3. What is science • An organized way of using evidence to learn about the natural world.

4. Thinking like a scientist • If the car wont start, what steps would people take to figure out why? • 1) observations = gathering information about events or processes in a careful orderly way • Usually involves using your senses • 2) data = the information gathered from your observations • 3) inference= a logical interpretation based on prior knowledge or experience

5. Explaining and Interpreting Evidence • Scientists explain events in nature by interpreting evidence • Hypothesis = a proposed scientific explanation for a set of observations • A hypothesis must in a form that can be tested!

6. Science as a way of knowing • Science discusses many facts, however don’t think biology is a set of truths that never change. • Science is a way of knowing! • Rather than unchanging knowledge, science is an ongoing process that involves asking questions, observing, making inferences, and testing hypothesis.

7. How Science Works

8. Designing an experiment • 1) Asking a Question • Identify a problem to be solved • 2) Forming a Hypothesis • Using prior knowledge or experience to answer the question

9. Designing an experiment • 3) Setting up a controlled experiment • Test your hypothesis with an experiment that only tests one variable at a time. All other variables must be kept the same

10. Variables • Manipulated/Independent Variable = The variable that is purposely changed • Responding/Dependent Variable = The variable that is observed • What you are testing for or looking to see happen

11. How a Theory Develops • When many experiments/investigations build up evidence, a hypothesis can become so well supported that we call it a theory. • Theory = a well tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.