Susan Williams (2009) article "Ways of Seeing Africa"

4. Practice using the Scientific Method to describe something you have seen this week by answering "W 1 5 questions listed below. To assist you, an example has been provided. Your submission will be 1 assessed on the appropriateness of your observations, the logic you used to answer your initial question and the quality of the additional hypotheses. Feel free to includg pictgres/dgwmn. a) In the next day or so, 1 want you to make an observation that is related to some sort of pmgss. it can be about any process, but the key to a decent observation is to be able to ask “why is it like that?” or “How does this happen?” o For instance. while sitting in the dentist chair yesterday i noticed a big curved scrape in the f drywall on the wall in front of the chair, about 2 feet long. '/4 inch deep. See the drawing below. A C b) Next, ask a Question about your observation. This question usually includes the words “how” or “why.” C If you have trouble forming a decent question, you might want to consider a different observation. 0 “How did that scrape get there?“ C) W- l 0 “There are no other marks on the wall.” o “The part of the chair that sticks out the most is the elbow on the rotating arm the light is attached to.” o “The scrape is higher on the wall than any or part of the chair or other instrument in the room, including the elbow of the light arm.” 1 0 “There is some drywall stuck to the back side of the elbow of the light arm, and it has some paint on it that is the same color as the paint on the wall” (I had to get up out of the chair and look around to find this data) Q d) Once you have made several observations that help answer your Question, go ahead and try to answer 6 your Question. The answer to your question is your hypothesis, and it should come in the form of a confident statement. Then you should justify your statement with your observations. o “The scrape on the wall happened when they moved the chair into the office and the light arm 1 rubbed against the wall. The evidence I see for this is the paint and drywall stuck on the back of the elbow of the light arm, and that the light arm is not high enough for this to happen while it is sitting in its current position. Also, it only happened once because there is only one scrape. It must have happened when the chair was higher than it is now, and that would be when people i were moving it into the office.” e) WWWMW understanding of the process or the objects involved. 1 0 “It must be difficult to move a dental chair into position” 0 “These people really don’t care about what this place looks like since they haven’t fixed or painted the wall, they haven’t even hung a picture over the scrape, and the crud is still on the light arm.” Page I 14 Scanned by CamScanner 1. Practice using the Scientific Method to describe something you have seen this week by answering the 5 questions listed below. To assist you, an example has been provided. Your submission will be assessed on the appropriateness of your observations, the logic you used to answer your initial question and the quality of the additional hypotheses. Feel free to include pictures/drawings. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) 2. A scientist wants to shorten the ripening time for tomato plants. They make a prediction that the more water the plants receive, the faster they will ripen. To test this prediction, the scientist grows 10 beefsteak tomato plants in a sunny garden that is watered three times a day and 5 cherry tomato plants in a partly sunny garden that is watered once a day. The scientist then records the time it takes for the tomatoes to ripen. What are the independent and dependent variables in this experiment? Independent Dependent Do you think this experimental design properly tests the scientist’s prediction? Why or why not? How would you fix and/or improve upon this design in order to test the prediction that more water will result in a faster ripening of tomatoes?