Can anyone explain to me or give me a link that shows the steps for the scientific method?

Question

Here is the problem I need help on.

Smithers thinks that a special juice will increase the productivity of workers. He creates two groups of 50 workers each and assigns each group the same task (in this case, they're supposed to staple a set of papers). Group A is given the special juice to drink while they work. Group B is not given the special juice. After an hour, Smithers counts how many stacks of papers each group has made. Group A made 1,587 stacks, Group B made 2,113 stacks.

1. Control Group

2. Independent Variable

3. Dependent Variable

4. What should Smithers' conclusion be?

5. How could this experiment be improved?

Answer 1

Here are good links for the steps:  

http://science.howstuffworks.com/scienti...

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/...

However, I'm wondering if you aren't asking about what are the components of a strong experiment. If that's the case, then this may help:

Independent variable: what Smithers changed (and how he changed it)

Constant: how Smithers keeps all other variables the same (so that you know the dependent variable is due to the independent variable).

Control: the standard used to determine if any changes occurred. (What you compare your results to in order to know whether any changes occurred.) In this case, how do you know if the special juice impacted productivity? You have to compare that group to something, which would be the group that didn't get any special juice.



Dependent variable: what will probably change because Smithers changed the independent variable

Hope this helps!