Mac's Observation or Experiment

Compare voter satisfaction levels between people assigned to use either paper ballots or touchscreen machines.

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

Determine which brands of orange juice people prefer. The people are randomly chosen at the supermarket and are asked to taste both brands without knowing which brand they are drinking.

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

Determine if people who take vitamin C every day are less likely to get colds.

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

Compare the grades on a final math test of 25 students who use calculators and 25 students who do not use calculators. The students decide which group they are in.

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

A teacher asks her students to write down all they eat in a day and then calculate the total number of calories consumed. 

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

The cafeteria manager of a high school wants to find out if high prices are keeping students from using the cafeteria. Fifty students are chosen at random to receive half-price lunch passes every day for a month. The manager then records the number of passes used. 

• Experiment
• Observational Study

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

Of observational studies, surveys, and experiments, random sampling is only important in experiments.

• True
• False

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

If you discovered that eating granola for breakfast improved English scores in a random sample of 20 males from your school, it would not be valid to generalize these results to the females.

• True
• False

Tags

CCSS.RI.8.1

CCSS.RI.8.8

CCSS.RL.11-12.1

CCSS.RL.8.1

CCSS.RL.9-10.1

Is diet or exercise effective in combating insomnia? Some believe that cutting out desserts can help alleviate the problem, while others recommend exercise. Forty volunteers suffering from insomnia agreed to participate in a month-long experiment. Half were randomly assigned to a special no-desserts diet; the others continued desserts as usual. Half of the people in each of these groups were randomly assigned to an exercise program, while the others did not exercise. Those who ate no desserts and engaged in exercise showed the most improvement. 

• Observational Study
• Experiment

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3

Researchers have linked an increase in the incidence of breast cancer in Italy to dioxin released by an industrial accident in 1976. The study identified 981 women who lived near the site of the industrial explosion and were under age 40 at the time. Fifteen of the women had developed breast cancer, at an unusually young average age of 45. Medical records showed that these women had heightened concentrations of dioxin in their blood, and that each 10-fold increase in dioxin level was associated with a doubling of the risk of breast cancer. (Science News, Aug. 3, 2002)

• Observational Study
• Experiment

Tags

CCSS.HSS.IC.B.3