so one of the obviously one of the things we're focusing on this semester is this idea of the process of science and looking at science works and why it works with dogs so that we can do science so i kind of want to get your thoughts about what you already think you understand about science i want to add to it tie in a little bit some of the pre-lab stuff that we did um and talk about how science is really done so [Music] let's can you see that okay or should i make it bigger so i'm sure you've all heard of this idea called the scientific method and so i think i mentioned i started my teaching career as a middle school science teacher and some of the things we always did was being in the school year we talked about scientific method and then teaching students how to do basic science and i'm sure you had that middle school in high school and maybe other science classes but i want to kind of break this down a little bit because my view is that while those seven steps of the scientific method that your science teacher had on the poster and the wall in the back of the room while those are important and we do use those that's not really how science works it's it's i look at those seven steps of the scientific method as kind of a guide to help you do science but there's more to it than just that and we're at the the age that we're at the the academic level where it's now time to start looking at this in the real world and how we really it's how scientists really do science so what we're going to do is we're going to kind of walk through those seven steps or maybe eight depending on your perspective and kind of talk about it a little bit and and get your feelings on that and kind of add to it as i said so if you think about that poster that was on your science teacher's wall what was the first thing on that poster and not typically first but possibly it could be so it's typically and we can write this a couple different ways identification of a problem ask a question or we can even simply say make an observation and this already to me is starting to look like well if we have seven steps why is there three different things on this first step because you could do a lot of these different things in a variety of different you could do all these things but not necessarily in this order so you may make an observation as you're walking through the woods and you think well that's an interesting that's a problem why is this here why is this growing here and it shouldn't and then you come up with a question so these all three of these things are important but the order in which they take place could vary now scientists make observations which i mentioned here which are typically what lead to that problem now these observations can be just by chance um they could be made as a after conducting an experiment maybe you do an experiment and that arises gives a rise to other questions because of observations that were made during that experiment so observation is made uh a problem the scientist or the person realizes that a problem exists and so they ask a question you get up you go to start your car it doesn't start you make an observation it doesn't start that's a problem because now i can't get to work or get to school so the question then becomes well why doesn't my car start so what do you do next and there could be a couple different things you could do to help figure out why your car doesn't start to so your question is why doesn't my car start okay think of ways to try and solve the problem about why your car doesn't start but wouldn't you need to know why it doesn't start to begin with or at least have a starting point about why it might not start so what do we call that this is where you form a hypothesis now in this particular case if i got in the car and i wouldn't start obviously i make an observation i realize i have a problem the problem is my car doesn't start and i would initially hypothesize that okay well maybe my battery's dead and then i would investigate that let's talk a little bit about hypotheses before i kind of go on to my next thing um what's kind of the textbook definition of a hypothesis it yeah you're getting ahead of me but yes it's an if then because statement we'll talk about that in a second the textbook definition of a hypothesis is an educated guess you base your what you think it's what you think the answer to the question is or the solution to the problem is but you don't just make up some crazy bs that really is not grounded in anything you need to use logic and reasoning and a lot of times prior knowledge oops and a lot of times that prior knowledge comes from doing background research with backing something you've read something you've heard something you've experienced that type of thing so for example i'm not going to hypothesize that my car's not starting because jupiter is in alignment with mars and the moon is in capricorn okay that's there's no logic or reasoning behind that hypothesis what the heck does that have to do anything with my car so you need to make sure your hypothesis is i mean good is not a good word but you can't just make something crazy up it needs to be somewhat logical as it relates to the question and the other thing about a hypothesis that's really important couple things is that must be testable meaning you have to be able to collect data to show that that hypothesis is right or wrong and along the same lines a hypothesis must also be what we call falsifiable now that doesn't mean it has to be false it means that it has to be able to be proven false by data or data has to be collected that could potentially show that your hypothesis is incorrect there's no way to collect data to show that because jupiter is in alignment with mars and the sun is in capricorn that's why my car's not starting you can't collect data to show that's not true because what if it is lined up that way but there's no data to show that that is true or it's not true so a hypothesis must be written in a way that it could be proven false by the data you collect all right let me move this up so uh emily right so emily said a hypothesis should be an if then statement that is correct if we do this then we should see this and we're going to add to this because if we do this then we should see this because of this it kind of gets into what you had to do for your pre-lab about a method a prediction and an explanation the method is the if the prediction is the then and the explanation is the because now unfortunately i just i'm already behind it's the fourth day of class i'm already behind on uh getting things graded i wanted to have your hypotheses graded and a few comments on each of those before class today and it just it didn't happen um but i kind of have a general idea what people are going to say because i've seen you know about 100 of these over the last two semesters so when we look at that particular hypothesis that i wanted you to write and the background was that creatine supplements are taken um and they're supposed to help increase muscle mass and so the scenario was or the question was what happens if someone takes 10 grams of creatine a day for 40 days without resistance training and you need to come up with a hypothesis and so you should have had something along the lines of if 10 grams of creatine per day are taken for 40 days then the belly of the biceps brachii muscle will show an increased diameter dot dot dot because creatine is thought to increase muscle mass you didn't have to have that exactly but something along those lines what i've seen over the last two semesters from those that i did grade this week and last semester and i see it if we practice this a fair amount is that most people have a hard time writing the because or the explanation and it's obviously notice it's not a detailed explanation it doesn't get into the physiology as to why it just says why are we it's a brief justification about why we are making that prediction okay so this is what i was looking for now the other thing that you should always have in your hypothesis is and this is what you also had to do on that assignment is your hypothesis should also include the independent and dependent variables which are part of your experiment how do you define the dependent variable you're doing an experiment and you have a dependent variable so it's what you're measuring it's what you think is going to change or possibly change as a result of subjecting somebody or whatever you're doing to the experiment so the independent variable then is what is manipulated what you're testing and the dependent variable is what's the outcome of whatever we're looking at when this variable is applied okay it's what happens so in the case of this creatine one the 10 grams of creatine per day is the independent variable which we're saying is going to affect the size of the biceps brachii muscles so the size of the biceps brachii remember that one not the biceps femoris but the biceps brachii up here we're saying that that may change as a result of taking the creatine that's our dependent the size of the biceps brachii is dependent upon the creatine being ingested okay number three so you proposed your hypothesis then what would you do so as a scientist would you start spending your hard one grant money investigating problems somebody's already answered so how do you know somebody might not have already answered this question huh you've got to do background research now i mentioned background research already you have to do a very as a scientist you have to go and do a very thorough literature review it's called what has already been done on the topic what hasn't been done on the topic based on what's been done already can you use any of that information to help you explain why you think this part of the bigger picture of the problem why you can answer that or how you can answer that so even though i mentioned background research up here about obviously this prior knowledge about hypothesizing sometimes you may want to before you even propose a hypothesis do your background research see if there is an answer to that already now you're probably not gonna get on your phone when your car doesn't start and google why won't my car start now my dad probably would because he knows nothing about cars so he would probably get on his phone and google why won't my car start or he would just call the tow truck yeah my car doesn't start come figure it out anyway so you're probably not gonna do that but you could okay i identified my problem car doesn't start okay let's do background research on why the car doesn't start okay the battery might be better all right so now i'm to check my battery so you could as a scientist have an idea about what's happening and then you can go to the research see what's already been done see if you can find some justification for your hypothesis and then maybe end up tweaking it and changing that hypothesis and making it better as a result of the background research um so a couple things about background research and we will be doing this throughout the semester so this is important to see what's already been done allows revisions to the hypothesis if necessary it's also important because it can help you design your experiment it's important to see what other people have already done because maybe somebody's done something similar that you can adapt to collect data to answer your question and obviously it helps you figure out if somebody's already answered the question now when we do background research for our projects and for the labs that we do we are going to focus on looking at what's called peer reviewed literature that means we're not going to be using cnn.com foxnews.com wikipedia okay we're going to be using scientific journals published through professional organizations that are reputable where scientists have conducted their research they've written a manuscript they sent it in for publication the editors send it to anonymous experts in the field who then review that manuscript to make sure the science was done right that their data was analyzed properly they provide feedback to those authors they provide they it's kind of a check and balance because there are some unscrupulous scientists out there unfortunately um so we'll be working with peer-reviewed literature you'll be bringing a little bit and watching a few things about that for your pre-lab for next week so peer review literature all right all right so the first thing on my scientific poster on my wall so we've got our problem our question we've refined our question to make it a good scientific question we have a good hypothesis based on good background research then what do we do someone mentioned it earlier now you experiment you collect your data but you have to typically design your experiment first yeah you can go online and go on research papers and look and see very specific lab protocols that have been done to do a very specific task so if you want to extract dna from fossilized bone there's protocols out there on how to do that but that doesn't necessarily help you get the data you need okay that may not help you answer the question but it will help you figure out how to get the dna out of the fossilized bone or whatever the case is so there's no book you can go to and say all right to answer this scientific question do these steps no scientists have to figure that out sometimes they have to invent new ways of doing things they have to invent new technology and new equipment to get the data they need one of the things you do not see when you read a peer-reviewed paper is you don't see the mistakes that they made and all the trial and testing that they did to get to the point where they have an experiment that yields them data that helps them answer the question and so not only you need to design your experiment you need to test it and then you need to to actually do the final run i guess we can say the actual experiment so scientists are learning from their mistakes well we know this protocol works to do this let's see if we can adapt it and get results that we think work and maybe they get some data that works and so they tweak that protocol until they know it works and then they can use what worked then as their data um so in the experimental phase in the experimental process um we can actually conduct two kinds of research basic research and applied and i like to think of basic research as hey let's just see what happens so sometimes scientists have no idea why things happen and they say all right let's just test something let's just see what happens they may not necessarily have a hypothesis and then from that data what they end up doing is they say okay well how can we explain why we saw this and then they create another experiment to try and answer the question about well why did we see this result when we did this and that then becomes applied research where they're getting more and more focused on answering a specific question now when an experiment is designed obviously we talked about the independent and dependent variables a lot of biology based research bench research you know chemistry physics that type of stuff a lot of that you're going to have both you're going to have an independent variable where you're actually testing something specific to see the outcome that's kind of more your applied research so you're testing one particular thing let's say i want to test this chemical to see how this particular chemical affects the growth of mice that's my independent variable and obviously my dependent variable in that case would be the growth rate of the mites or what happens when the mice take this now besides these two variables we can kind of talk about two more we have what we can call controlled variables and we have what we can call um [Music] confounding variables confounding variables are those things that number one maybe you can't control or things that you don't think about when designing your experiment that could affect your results when you don't want them to affect your results so let's say we have two groups of mice and group two gets chemical x because we think this chemical is going to allow these mice to exercise a lot longer when they take it how do we know that chemical x which is our independent variable and their exercise rate would be dependent variable how do we know if chemical x actually allowed those mice to exercise longer what do we also need to do in our experiment to show that yeah that really happened what what you have to separate the mice so if this group two is our group that gets the treatment what do we call the group that does not get the treatment so this group here is our control group they do not get the treatment they are not subjected to that independent variable because we need to be able to compare essentially results before and after now the other way to do this experiment would be all right let's test the mice the same group of mice for two weeks beforehand and then we'll give them this chemical and then we'll test them for another two weeks so the data collected before they got the chemical would be the control data and the data they collected after they got the chemical would be our experimental data but you can also do it this way where you have two different groups we'll talk about that next week and throughout the semester as well okay that's what we call independent data and correlated data so when you design an experiment typically you're going to have one group that doesn't get the very independent variable and one group that does because you need to compare those now what is the only difference then between these two groups if you were to set this experiment up on a bench what would be the only thing if you had group a and group b the only thing different between those groups what in this case chemical x the independent variable so everything else that's identical in the experiment the amount of light in the cage the grams of food the amount of water the amount of exercise the temperature the size of the cage number of males etcetera those are what we call controlled variables and when i talked about confounding variables and things you cannot control for that's a confounding variable as a scientist you need to think about well if i can't control for this how do i explain my results then and show that this isn't really having an effect and there's statistical ways to do that and there's other scientific ways to explain that sometimes you don't think about certain things and you realize after the fact oh we thought that everything was the same but we didn't consider this that could possibly have had an effect on the outcome so how do you know it's chemical x then that caused a change in the exercise ability of the mice theoretically you don't because it could have been this other thing too it could have been a combination of both so when you're doing an experiment it's really important to only test one independent variable all right um okay step five you've collected all your data we'll talk more about data next week what do you do with it now analyze your data so obviously this includes statistical analysis there's descriptive statistics there's means testing that's our lab next week um a lot of it is just simple organization which include graphs um you know looking for trends patterns relationships obviously depends on your research question and the specific data you're able to collect this could also include consulting your peers okay talking to other scientists to maybe help you uh think about maybe why this happened you can also go back to the literature and compare your data that you got to what other experiments done are you seeing any relationships between these different experiments while the research question may not be identical there could be it could be related to the same bigger picture all scientific research is done to add new knowledge to the scientific knowledge base to help answer these bigger questions in nature all right so you've analyzed your data now what i guess if you had to write a scientific paper about what you did what would you do now you'd want so you would interpret your data that's kind of part of the analysis and then how would you then tell your peers or tell me about what your results mean what do we call that this is what the results mean why it's important you're wrapping up your experiment drawing a conclusion now this is not a conclusion to it's a conclusion to this question this is not a conclusion to the bigger picture about how this fits into the bigger picture of the scientific problem if you're studying gene expression or human development and its relationship to gene expression you might have just answered one little piece of that puzzle so you can't say that yes we've solved embryonic development and gene expression and body symmetry well no you've added one little piece of data to understanding this bigger picture so this conclusion is simply a conclusion about this part of the overall research so when you draw your conclusion as if you're writing a paper presenting it you explain what the data mean you explain why this data is important especially what we want to call the broader impacts we can explain why this information is important to this little piece of the puzzle but how does this relate to the big puzzle as a whole to the how does this relate to you know uh um personal health how does this relate to disease how does it relate to the environment as a whole even though you're only looking at one little thing so that's important um obviously comparisons to the literature and maybe how your results are different from what other results are and why that difference is important and what it means future research the conclusion of one experiment typically leads to maybe five or six more or maybe even more questions to ask as a result of this one little piece of the puzzle and why those experiments might be important and maybe how you might go about that now in our case one of the things you're probably going to want to talk about is why things didn't work or maybe why you didn't see the results you expected to see now we just don't have the time to go back and redo it till we get it perfect it's just not gonna it's not gonna happen so to me it's important that if you can't really draw a conclusion and that what you expected to see you don't see it doesn't mean your experiment's wrong and i'm not going to fail you on your project because you didn't get the right answer we don't necessarily know what the right answer is so it's going to be really important for you and your groups to talk about why didn't work what you can do differently in the future and why that might change the outcome of your results um okay almost done here so the last thing on that scientific poster i had on my wall and maybe there could be two more if we don't pick it out we'll add it but so what's number seven what all good scientists do how do they know that what they did and the way they collected their data actually worked yes you have a control group but how do you know it wasn't just a fluke that maybe a mistake happened that you didn't know about and it really oh my god it worked how do you know that what do scientists have to do obviously look for errors and sometimes they're very apparent i mean you don't know you have an error or something went wrong until you do the experiment again so i laugh at this being number seven that scientists you need to repeat your work but scientists don't do their whole experiment and then go do it again and then do it again okay scientists use what are called replicates and they do their repeating of the work at the same time so if i'm growing mice i'm not just going to do have one mouse that gets this chemical and one that doesn't i might have a hundred mice that get the chemical and a hundred that don't and i'm getting data from each of these mice and i'm able to compare all that data at the same time that's my repeating of the work because if i just did one mouse that got the chemical one that didn't maybe i got lucky if i did two you know maybe i could get the same results but if i got one that did better and one that didn't what do i say about it so it's really important that um you repeat the work all at the same time uh and the other issue with that is is that you don't want to if i'm one of the things i used to do with students is we used to study freshwater sponges and without getting into freshwater sponge biology which i would love to do we would grow freshwater sponges at different temperatures to see how it affected the rate at which they reached adult size and it takes a week week and a half and so sponges don't have seeds they're animals um they they start from what are called jamuels which are like seeds and so we would take a single gemule and we put it in a in a container it's a well plate it's got like 6 8 10 24 96 little compartments in it and so if we did an eight well plate we'd have three eight wall plates we'd have 24 sponges that we would grow and each of these three each of these is a replicate all of these would put in our growth be put in our growth chamber at the same time and then what we'd do is we'd compare the rate at which they reached a certain stage of growth and compare those if i just had one sponge i have nothing to compare it to but when i have eight sponges well i can compare all eight of these but what if i grew this one during the first week and this one during the second week and this one during the third what if i got slightly different results here because maybe the incubator went 0.2 degrees higher or 0.2 degrees lower when it was supposed to be at 20 even that change in temperature could very well have affected the growth rate of these sponges so it's really important that all of these replicates occur at the same time under exactly the same conditions so just like if we grew sponges at 20 maybe we grew some at 18 maybe we grew some at 22 celsius so not only do i have to control everything except the temperature now when i'm growing my replicates everything has to be the same that's how scientists repeat their work okay so again i chuckle at the fact oh let's repeat our work after we do everything no you repeat it during the experimental process and what might be the last thing and this really is an important part of science oops and this is what you're going to be doing in the last week of classes present share your research publish speak at conferences share your data i used to teach a research class and that was probably the most rewarding thing for me as their research mentor was taking them uh to a conference and i've taken students to a lot of conferences across the country and watching them really show ownership of their research and talking like an expert in their field that's a really important part of science and even for student researchers that's really really important