Greetings everyone my name is Marc Hnytka and I am a full time instructor for
the College of Liberal Arts here at
Ashford University
Today I am going to explain a very important
but often misunderstood concept in
science
The scientific method
The scientific method is a systematic way to better understand
the world that we live in
and objects and phenomena that we might
encounter
To better understand the scientific method
I will use an example based on a problem
that I recently had to deal with
My beautiful Kale plants were getting
eaten by some
unseen creature before I could harvest
and enjoy it.
Let's go through the five steps the scientific method and see if we can solve this problem
Step one is to state the problem.  In this
case it was relatively easy:
something was eating my Kale.
Step two is to form a hypothesis. First I did some scholarly research on common garden pests
that might eat kale
and consulted some pictures of different
kinds of insect damage.
Based on those findings I hypothesize
that slugs are eating my kale.
Step three is to test
your hypothesis
I did some more research about how to
stop slugs from eating your plants
and I decided to experiment by
putting out a small
shallow dish with beer to act as a slug
trap.
Fourth, we analyze the results of the experiment.
As you can see
I found a variety of up white
and black slugs of different sizes in
the cup after
about 24 hours.   Lastly we draw
conclusions based on the results of the
experiment.  In this case
i asked: did the damage to the plant stop
when I put out the trap and caught the
slugs?
In this case it did!  So my conclusion
is that it appears that slugs were at
least partly responsible for the damage.
We have victory! So in review:
the five steps of the scientific method: one -
state the problem
two - form a hypothesis, three - test the
hypothesis with an experiment,  four -
analyze the results of the experiment
and five - draw conclusions based on the results
Another thing that is important to
consider
when you're looking at the scientific
method and an experiment and analyzing the
results, are possible confounding factors.
A confounding factor something that you
didn't have control over in the
experiment or were not carefully observing
that might have affected the results of the
experiment, therefore changing
the interpretation of the results.  So
in this case weather might have played a
factor.
The temperature and moisture might have
led to different kinds of insects being
more or less
active.  So perhaps the temperature and
moisture conditions
actually caused, when I observe the
damage to the plant's
the insects that were causing the damage,
maybe they were driven away by
differences in temperature and moisture
and I happen to catch the slugs as well, but
maybe those were not related.
So that's how weather could be a
confounding factor.  Also other
insects and predators of those insects
depending on their patterns of behavior,
that might have also
changed how the kale was damaged
independently
of the fact that I caught the slugs in
the trap.  Thirdly: human error is also
usually, a factor, a possible
confounding factor in experiments
because we can make mistakes
we may not observe things carefully
enough. We might
accidentally do something that
we were not supposed to.
So human error is generally always a
possible factor.
Also, something that we can look at
are future experiments based on the
results
of the experiments we conducted.  So in
this case I might look at
getting some traps designed to catch
multiple types of insects
and see what I catch and see if maybe
some of those insects might have also
been causing similar problems.
And I could also possibly set up cameras
to observe
what is actually happening to the plants
in a real time setting
and record that data and then observe
that carefully
to see what's going on.
References for this short
presentation: Contemporary Environmental
Issues by Turk and Bensel
2011 and also: The New Organic Grower
by Eliot Coleman.  For another example
see Chapter 1.7 in Contemporary
Environmental Issues
to see a different example of the
scientific method.  Well, I hope you all
learned something and I hope you all have
a great time applying the scientific
method
in your own lives in your own academic
studies!
Thanks and have a great day : )
