Hi everyone! I'm Professor Geier, in case
you haven't met me,
and today we are going to talk more
about asking scientific questions.
At this point you have already been in
lab
and you have worked with
our organisms in lab and you've made
some observations
and asked some questions about them.  So
we're going to
dive a little deeper into some ways to
ask
scientific questions. So
an important part of science is
investigating, understanding, and
developing explanations for whatever you
are studying whether it's the earth,
the universe, systems, here we're doing
biology so how all of the different
organisms
and how they interact together how all
of that works.
And investigation is built from
scientific questions,
so that's why coming up with scientific
questions is such an important part of
science.
So before we can come up with scientific
questions, though, we need to
tackle an idea of what is science? And
you already thought about this
in lab already when you were
trying to decide if your questions and
your observations
were scientific. Could they be answered
using science? And
the ultimate goal of science is to
explain the natural world.
So when you're trying to explain the
natural world,
there are scientific questions and there
are questions that fall
outside the realm of science. So
hopefully you said some things
about scientific questions like they are
limited to explanations
that are based in nature, meaning the
opposite of supernatural
so it cannot involve ghosts or fairies
or elves it's got to be about nature. It
has to be observable.
It has to be testable.
Other things about scientific questions--
they have to rely on evidence. It's not just someone's opinion. You
actually have to do an experiment. You
have to gather evidence. There has to be
information to help support
your ideas. So scientific questions
and questions that fall outside of
science are important to remember so
that when we're
asking questions in science we stick
with our scientific questions.
So one introductory biology book defined
science as an experimental,
hypothesis-driven investigation
of phenomena to elucidate patterns in
nature
and the processes governing the
formation,
maintenance, and changing of those
patterns. So in science we want to look
for these patterns,
but we've got to have-- as you see in this
this definition--
experiments. We've got to have hypotheses;
we have to be able to
do an investigation; and it's going to be
in
our natural world.
So explaining our natural world
means we're going to be working with
cause and effect and maybe you already
started to think about cause and effect
as you were thinking about
what science is. Science is trying to
figure out what
causes the things that we see in the
world.
So answering these kinds of questions
about cause and effect
is incredibly important and leads to
some of our
huge ideas in science. So
we're gonna focus for the next few
minutes about
this idea of cause and effect. Not every
part of science is about cause and
effect,
but a large part of it is. So today
we're gonna study that a little bit. So
to start off, just to make this a little
easier and not quite so scary-- some
people are really afraid of
making scientific questions or think
that it's really hard to come up with a
good scientific question--
so just to get your creative juices
flowing
let's for a few minutes talk about some
synonyms.
What else could we say besides "cause"?
or what else could we say besides
"effect"? So i actually want you to stop
and think for a few minutes--
what are some other words for "cause"? what
are some other words for "effect"?
Since you're doing this at home, you
could even use a thesaurus if you have
one
laying around or on your phone or
something but really
try to come up with some ideas for "cause"
and some ideas for "effect."
So I came up with some of words for
"cause" and "effect," so this this is my list.
So some synonyms for "cause" that I came
up with: origin,
stimulation, driver, generator, motive,
agent, force, factor, actor, source,
basis. You might have come up with
some other ones-
as long as these are all synonyms for
cause.
And then we've got effect-- so effect
could be the end,
the consequence, the response, the
aftermath,
pattern, conclusion, outcome, reaction.
So you probably came up with even some
other ones.
So now we've got some other ideas for
things that could be a "cause"
and things meaning "effect."
So now we're going to jump to English
just for a moment-- you're probably
thinking "What? This is science!" but just for a moment think about
English. What kind of
words are cause and effect?
So cause and effect are the subject
and the object.
So if we're going to make a sentence,
what type of word
connects subjects to direct objects?
This isn't that hard-
we're looking for verbs.
So --in case you were wondering what was
that middle column for?--we're now going to
think of some verbs
that can link all of those synonyms for
cause and effect. Doesn't have to
directly link the one
in the row because I didn't put them in
any sort of order. But just
what kind of verbs could link some of
these ideas
of cause and effect? And this is going to
be our third
ingredient in your question. So I do want
you to think about
what are some of these words--
some of these verbs-- that we could use?
So take a few minutes--what are some of
your verbs?
So here are some of my verbs and
again not in any particular order.
Hopefully you came up with some other
ones.
So some verbs--alters, generates,
increases, decreases, stimulates, regulates,
suppresses, controls, causes,
leads to. So all of these different
verbs and many, many more could link some of these ideas of cause
and effect. So
all we have to do is take our cause
and our effect and link it with a verb
and we can come up with some great
questions. So let's try it out!
So here we have a list of different
organisms:
shark, grouper, seagrass, brain coral, crab,
and plankton and I want you to just pick
one. And I want you to come up with a
research question that includes
the organism. Now the organism could be
your cause
or your effect your choice but you're
going to come up with a question.
So maybe I'm going to pick seagrass
and maybe my question is
How does ocean acidification--
so the oceans becoming more acidic-- how
does ocean acidification impact seagrass
growth?
It had a subject--that cause--
and an effect and it had a verb: so ocean
acidification and sea growth
sea grass growth and I'm asking about
the impact.
So I want you to take a minute--or
lots of minutes--pick an organism
and I want you to come up with a
question.
And your question is going to have this
cause, this effect,
and a verb.
All right, so let's think about your
questions now that you have come up with
some questions.
What happens if you switch the cause
and the effect? Do you end up with a
different question? So remember
my question was "How does ocean
acidification
impact seagrass growth?" If I switch
the cause and the effect, then
I get the question "Does seagrass growth
impact ocean acidification?"
It's a different question. It would
involve a different experiment.
What if we changed one of the words?
What if I said just does the presence
of seagrass impact ocean acidification?
So not if the grass grows or not
but just is it there or not. Again
a slightly different research question,
and you would approach it
differently in your experiment.
So different questions or recipes--
investigations--are formed if we just
change some of the words in our sentence.
So some small changes can drastically
change
your investigation.
So coming up with a recipe is not so
hard.
You all have just done it! You all have
just come up with some questions that
could be great questions that you could
go on to do research about.
So formulating a question that supports
this recipe for investigating
relationships between cause and effect
is also important in communication and
science communication is one of the
things we're going to
study this semester. So
you're now going to go to the next
Moodle activity and you're going to look
at a list of
journal titles. These are scientific
journal titles and
you're going to evaluate them. You're
going to see if you can just
pick out the cause and the effect
in some of these different
scientists' titles.
So try that out it's the next
activity in Moodle
and see how well you are doing.
