Inductive Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning, and The Scientific Method Flashcards
organized process that scientists use to investigate
scenarios/problems and to find solutions is called the _________ ___________
scientific method
What are the 6 steps of the scientific method?
- Observation - Purpose/ Question
- Hypothesis
- Design an experiment
- Examining and interpreting
- Evaluating the results
- Peer review (evaluation, publication)
When coming up with a purpose/question, what is one of the first things you want to do?
Find more information about your topic of interest by asking questions like “how?’ and “why?” and researching said topic to see what other experimentations have been done
When researching your topic of interest, what are five good available resources?
- scientific research articles
- Databases
- books
- search the web
- discuss your topic of interest with others
________ is when you try to predict the answer to the problem, a tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or a scientific problem that can be tested.
Hypothesis
Hypothesis is also called an _________ __________
educated guess
The stated hypothesis must be __________ and __________
- testifiable
- falsifiable
List the 3 characteristics of a well-designed study.
- Experimental design must be detailed enough to be repeatable by another researcher
- Control all the variables that are not of interest of the study (to eliminate or minimize the effect of variables which are not the interest of the study)
- Experiment must be repeated to obtain reliable results
_______________ ______________ is the variable that is changed in a
scientific experiment or a variable that does not depend on another and is not affected by the state of any other variable in the experiment
Independent variable
Another name for independent variable is __________ __________.
manipulated variable
__________ __________ is the variable being tested in a scientific experiment or this is what occurs in response to the changing independent variable
Dependent variable
Another name for the dependent variable is the ________ ________
responding variable
___________ __________ is any variable that’s held constant in a
research study. It’s not a variable of interest in the study, but it’s controlled because it could influence the outcomes
controlled variable
another name for controlled variable is __________ _________
confounding variable
What are two examples of negative control?
- no treatment/pill
- given a placebo
___________ lacks the active ingredient of a treatment being tested in the study but is identical in appearance to the treatment. Thus, the participants cannot distinguish it from the real treatment.
placebo
The ________ _________ refers to the situation in which patients, who receive the placebo, improve simply because they believe they are receiving useful treatment
placebo effect
__________ is the practice of keeping participants and/or researchers in the dark as to who is in the control group and who is in the treatment group. They are prevented from knowing certain information of the study that they are not influenced by that knowledge
Blinding
Single Blind vs Double Blind
- with a single blind study participants do not know whether they are in the treatment or control (placebo) group, but the researchers do know
- with a double blind study neither participants nor the researchers collecting the data know who is in the treatment or control group
Between a single blind study and double blind study, which one would eliminate or minimize the placebo effect?
The double blind study
a process by which a scholarly work is checked by a group of experts in the same field before it is published is called a ____________ _____________
peer review
a ________ is an integrated, comprehensive
explanation of many “facts,” especially ones
that have been repeatedly tested or is widely
accepted and can be used to make
predictions about natural phenomena
theory
A ________ can often generate additional
hypotheses and testable predictions.
theory
___________ ___________ is the process of reasoning that a general principle is true because the all of the special cases you’ve seen, so far, are true
Inductive reasoning
__________ _________ is where science and the scientific method and scientific reasoning begin.
Inductive Reasoning
TRUE or FALSE: Inductive reasoning is not logically ‘valid’
TRUE
Why does inductive reasoning have no part in mathematical proof?
because inductive reasoning is not logically valid
_________ ___________ refers to the process of concluding that something must be true because it is a special case of a general principle that is taken to be true.
Deductive reasoning
Deductive Reasoning
- logically valid
- it is the fundamental method in testing scientific theories
- it is a necessary part of scientific reasoning.
Inductive reasoning is part of the _________ _______ whereby
the observation of special cases leads one to suspect very strongly (though not know with absolute logical certainty) that some general principle is true. Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, is the method you would use to investigate based on _______ ________ that the principle is either true or false.
- discovery process
- logical certainty
An __________ is a set of statements, one of which the conclusion is supported by the others.
argument
When is an argument deductively valid?
if and only if it is not possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false.
What does it mean for an argument to be deductively sound?
An argument is deductively sound if and only if it is deductively valid and the premises are true
Positive control vs negative control in experiments
A positive control group is a group in the experiment that is given a treatment with a known outcome, while a negative control group is given no special treatment at all
