In our science project guides, we give you step by step instructions for doing your project, starting with the hypothesis and ending with the conclusion. We don’t, however, give you what the hypothesis should be. Sometimes customers ask us why.
The reason is simple: the hypothesis is an educated guess – YOUR educated guess, and not ours. You must take what you already know about the subject, and predict what the outcome of your experiment will be. The good news is that since the hypothesis is a guess, it is always ‘right’ – because you’re just guessing.
Suppose three children are doing a science project to discover which type of water makes plants grow taller – mineral water, water with sugar, or plain distilled water. The first child’s hypothesis is that mineral water will make the plant grow taller. His grandmother owns a nutritional supplement store, and all his life he’s been taught that minerals are good for you. The second child predicts that sugar water will make the tallest plant. He bases this on his understanding that sugar makes you gain weight. And the third child, a purist at heart, figures that the distilled water will produce the most growth.
All of these hypotheses are correct, but only one will be proven true.
When you have a project to do, you can do research or use the knowledge you already have to form your hypothesis. With our project guides, we give you lots of research material to help you write your hypothesis for an experiment.
