Asking Questions
In this activity you’ll be focusing on developing questions about an ecosystem, rather than answering an assigned question. You will make observations, ask critical questions, and create hypotheses. This is what is often described as the “front end” of the scientific process. Ideally, for safety reasons, you should not carry out fieldwork on your own - find a friend to accompany you. Also, brainstorming your ideas with other people should help generate more questions and more ideas.
Materials
- Hula Hoop
- Field Journal
- Field Guides (plants, trees, or insects, for example)
Activity
Find a
natural area, either an abandoned, overgrown field, or an open wooded
area. Close your eyes and throw the hula hoop. When the hoop lands,
closely observe the area inside the hoop (we’ll refer to this as the
plot). You may want to sketch your observations in your field journal.
Spend around 20 minutes brainstorming questions about the organisms
(plants and animals) you’re observing. The questions you develop may be
simple ones, such as “what is that species of grass?” Or more complex,
such as “why are there only oak leaves present in the plot when there are
beech trees and an oak trees next to the plot?” Or, “are there more
caterpillars on the ironweeds than on the other plant species present?”
Write all the questions you can think of in your field journal. You should
be able to come up with at least 10 questions and write down all of them.
- Now look through your list of questions and think about how you might investigate each one. Choose three of the questions that you think are particularly interesting and think about how you might answer them.
- Now choose one of your questions and develop a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a tentative statement that proposes a possible explanation for the observation. It’s a statement that can be tested. For the caterpillar example in part 1, my hypothesis is that this particular caterpillar species is uniquely associated with ironweed.
- At this point you might want to discuss your ideas with the instructor before you move on to the next step.
- For the final step in the activity, try to design a procedure (an experiment or an activity) to test your hypothesis. What sort of information (data) would you need to collect? How would you measure that information? Using my caterpillar example again I could test my hypothesis by randomly sampling the area and inspecting the plants at each sampling location. I would record whether the plant was an ironweed or not, and whether caterpillars were present or not. I could then analyze that data to see if my hypothesis was supported or not.
- Write up your experiment in a brief report. The report can be written in a standard form (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). For some more detail on writing scientific reports the following site is useful: http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/lab_report_complete.html
