- When you complete your experiments, examine and organize your findings.
- Did your experiments give you the expected results? Why or why not?
- Was your experiment performed with the exact same steps each time?
- Are there other explanations that you had not considered or observed?
- Were there errors in your observations?
- If you get results that seem wrong or inconsistent, do not just throw them out. Try to figure out what happened. Maybe the data is correct and your hypothesis is flawed. Try to explain these outliers in your report.
- Don’t get discouraged when you encounter problems. Scientists often have to repeat experiments to get good, reproducible results. Sometimes you can learn more from a failure than you can from a success.
