What is Involved in an Experimental Science Project?

An experimental science project has four basic steps. You start out with making observations, because you have a question you want to answer. Say, for example, our question is, “Does magnetism affect the growth of plants?”

You ask your question, and then you want to try to come up with an idea of what the answer to that question is, so you make observations on the growth of plants and what you know about magnets affecting other things, and then you form a hypothesis. Earlier I was asking a question which led to the observations, but a hypothesis is a statement not a question.

I might say, “Magnets have no effect on the growth of plants,” and that would be in a hypothesis, that’s a statement. A hypothesis can either be confirmed or not confirmed. From there, that leads you to your controlled experiment, so you come up with an experiment to test your hypothesis.

What I might do here is I would take some sunflower seeds and put them in a pot with some dirt and I would put some magnets in the dirt with those seeds. Now this needs to be a controlled experiment, which means that we have a control.

If you’re familiar with that, that would just be taking another pot putting dirt in there and putting sunflower seeds in there this time not putting any magnets, so with a control you’re just differing from the experiment by one variable. We have two pots, and they’re just differing by one variable.

One has magnets, one doesn’t have magnets because we have to compare the sunflowers that are affected by magnets with the sunflowers that don’t have any magnets around them, otherwise we don’t know if there’s a difference. After we conduct the experiment, we form a conclusion, and to form the conclusion we have to decide if the hypothesis is confirmed or not confirmed.

Notice that I said “not confirmed,” not “disproved.” You confirm or do not confirm a hypothesis instead of proving or disproving it, because you never want to disprove something because there’s always a chance that more information could come out that would confirm your hypothesis.

Instead of saying that something’s totally disproved and totally implausible, you can just say that it’s not confirmed. In other words, we can’t confirm it, but we don’t know for sure that it’s not true. Then you form your conclusion from whether you confirmed or not did not confirm the hypothesis, so your conclusion is now fact because you backed it up by experimental data.

Now, of course, an experiment can always be fallible, and many popular beliefs once proved by experiments have been now overturned by other experiments, but still when you have a conclusion, you’re accepting that it’s fact because you have backed it up with data. Those are the four basic steps of an experimental science project.