Predictions and the Hypothesis

Hypothesis

It’s now time to develop your hypothesis and make a prediction.

You have done your research and that gives you your background knowledge. Hopefully, you will have a whole range of interesting questions that you want to answer. It's now time to choose just one question and this will be the basis of your hypothesis.

Be careful when developing your hypothesis (question)try to make it specific. General questions tend to be vague and it is difficult to decide what you are trying to study. Compare the following two questions.

Does temperature effect flies?

What difference does temperature have on the development time of house fly maggots.

Can you see how the second example is more specific. We have specified the subject (house flies)and two quantities (time and temperature).

Predictions

Once you have your question it is time to make a prediction. I’ll illustrate this using the maggot idea.

Based on my observations and research I think that increasing temperature will reduce the time taken for maggots to turn in to flies.

How did I come up with this prediction? Simple observation suggests more flies as the summer progresses and the temperature increases through the summer. Also as the Fall becomes cooler I see less flies. Research on the internet or libraries might also have shown that insects develop quicker in warmer temperatures.

So why is a prediction so important?

It gives us a defined idea to test and helps us focus on an idea.

If you fail to focus your experiment you run the risk of ending up with results that you can not interpret. There can be too many different things that can have an effect or be altered by an undefined experiment. Let me try to illustrate this with my maggots.

What if I breed maggots and see what happens. I end up with lots of flies in different containers. Some containers produced flies quicker, other containers the flies are larger, several containers the maggots died or never developed. Why did any of this happen? What caused it? The end result will be more questions and no answers. So my advice –

• Keep it simple.
• Focus on one question.
• Make a prediction.
• Control as many variables as possible.