How often do you share your work with your friends? Probably not very often. Scientists share their work with other scientists, through the process of peer review. The goal of peer review is to get experts in the same field as the experimenter to check the experiment before it is published. Peer review is useful because it allows a scientist to get feedback on their work. Peer review can catch mistakes in an experiment or in a conclusion that the original scientist might not notice. Another important function of peer review is deciding if the experiment is good enough to publish to share with the whole science community.
Look at the experiment information below. Practice peer reviewing. Do you notice any errors? What might a peer reviewer say about each experiment?
An experiment to test the hypothesis that cotton fabric is stronger than nylon fabric adds greater amounts of weight to the end of a strip of each type of fabric. Each strip has the same dimensions, and the weights were added in 5 g increments. The cotton fabric ripped at 45 grams, and the nylon fabric ripped at 90 grams. The conclusion is that nylon fabric is stronger than cotton.
An experiment is completed to test the hypothesis that ice melts faster with sugar on it. The experimenter gets two ice cubes that are the same size and sprinkles sugar on one of the cubes. The experimenter places the cube with sugar on the counter by a window and the other cube with no sugar on the counter in a shady corner. The cube with sugar melts in 3 minutes, and the cube with no sugar melts in 15 minutes. The experimenter concludes that sugar helps ice melt faster.
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The experiment is designed to control for all variables except one, and the conclusion is supported by the experimental results. The experiment did not do multiple tests, so the results are not reliable. |
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The experiment is not designed to control all variables except one. The ice cube that had sugar on it was also placed in a sunny place, so it cannot be concluded that it was the sugar which caused the ice cube to melt faster. |
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