Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Prediction The third step in the scientific method is making a prediction based on your hypothesis. Forming predictions is vital to the scientific method – if your prediction turns out to be correct, it will demonstrate that your hypothesis can accurately explain some aspect of the world. This is important, as one aspect of the scientific method is its ability to prove objectively that your way of understanding the world is valid. Let’s take the simple example of a car that will not start. If you notice the fuel gauge is pointing towards empty, you can announce your prediction to the other passengers that a careful test of the gas tank will show the car has no fuel. While this seems obvious, it is still significant to note, as a prediction like this is the only way to prove to your friends that you understand how a fuel gauge works and what it means. In the same way, a prediction made by a hypothesis is the only way to truly show that it represents reality. For instance, based on your vitamin hypothesis, you may predict people can be healthy and athletic while eating whatever they want as long as they regularly take vitamin supplements. If these prediction ends up being true, it will show that it is the vitamins (and only the vitamins) in fruits and vegetables that make people healthy and athletic. It will prove that your hypothesis shows how vitamins work. Experiment The final step is to perform an experiment that tests your prediction. You may decide to separate your healthy friends into three groups, give one group vitamin supplements and prohibit them from eating vegetables, give another group fake supplements and prohibit them from eating vegetables, and have the third act as the control group. It is critical to have a control group, as researchers need a group acting “normally” to which they can compare their results. If this experiment shows the real supplement group and the control group maintaining the same level of health and athleticism while the fake supplement group grows weak and sickly, you will know your hypothesis is true. If, on the other hand, you get unexpected results, you will need to go back to step one, analyze your results, make new observations, and try again with a different hypothesis. Any hypothesis that cannot be confirmed with experiment (or for fields like astronomy, using only observation) cannot be considered true and must be altered or abandoned. It is in this stage where scientists – being humans, with human beliefs and prejudices – are most likely to abandon the scientific method. If an experiment or observation gives a scientist results that he or she does not like, the scientist may be inclined to ignore the results rather than reexamine the hypothesis. This was the case for nearly a thousand years in astronomy with astronomers attempting to form accurate models of the solar system based on circular orbits of the planets and Earth as the center. For philosophical reasons, they believed that circles were “perfect” and that the Earth was “important,” so no model that had the correct elliptical orbits or the sun properly in the center was accepted until the 16 th century, even though those models more accurately described all astronomers’ observations.

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