Experimental Design by the Scientific Method
By Levi Clancy for Student Reader on
updated
- Laboratory Methods
- Acids and Bases
- Antibody techniques
- Caenorhabditis elegans
- Cell Culture
- Chemical Kinetics
- Common Laboratory Microbes
- Competition Assay
- Drosophila melanogaster
- Experimental Design by the Scientific Method
- Focus Assay
- Genetic techniques
- Measurement
- Models & Representations
- Mouse Models
- Pathology techniques
- Protein analysis
- Visual Assays
The Scientific Method is an organized, methodical, and structured way of finding information. It is as follows:
Make observations.
Formulate a hypothesis to explain the observations.
Try to disprove the hypothesis.
If not disproven, continue testing.
If the hypothesis is not disproven, it becomes a theory.
After many years, if not disproven, it becomes a law.
Experimental Design consists of four steps. These are taken to ensure that results are credible and reproducible.
| Step | Overview |
|---|---|
Control Variables | Control all variables except one. This necessitates: a sufficiently large group; random assignment; and different backgrounds (ie, ethnicity, sex or location). |
Double-Blind | Double-blind means that participants and experimenters are unaware which group a subject is in. This prevents the placebo effect from discrediting results. |
Hypothesis | After conducting the actual experiment, a hypothesis is formed to explain observations. A hypothesis could be, "I like apples more than oranges" or "I like apples just as much as oranges." |
Null Hypothesis | The opposite of the hypothesis is also tested. For example, "I like apples just as much as oranges" or "I do not like apples and oranges equally", respectively. |