Hypotheses and Variables

We have been working on our bird projects this week. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we will have the laptop lab and will work on updating our wiki pages and giving our research teams feedback on their projects. Monday we went over how to form hypotheses along with our guiding questions about birds. We looked at how the hypothesis needs to be based on a reasonable and educated guess about what we think might be happening. How we set up our investigations are very important so that we can collect data that will either support or reject our hypotheses. We used resources from the BirdSleuth curriculum from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Here is a Googledoc link to the Resource Pages. We used page 5 "Hypothesis Help."
Tuesday we used the information on pages 6 and 7 of the Resource Pages to help us understand the differences between Independent Variables, Dependent Variables and Control Variables when setting up an experiment. And how to show our results graphically. We used the graphs on the front pages of the Resource Pages and the Investigator's Journal for practice. Each student got a copy of the Investigator's Journal and handouts of the Variables page. On Page 4 of the Investigator's Journal we practiced identifying Independent and Dependent variables and how we might measure them.
They will need their final question, hypothesis and methods and materials figured out by this Friday, October 28th. All this will need to be posted on their wiki page.
We went over the checklist and timeline for the project as well. The final project will be finished by November 15th and shared in an oral presentation on November 17th.