The judges committee has awarded this submission

EXCELLENCE IN EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

PROJECT SUMMARY

We did an experiment to find out whether male or female dogs were more likely to get distracted by a metal fork's sound when dropped. We tested two small breed dogs of two different genders and recorded their reaction when we dropped a fork 3 meters away from them.

WHY?

We did this project for Biology class, trying to answer "Are female or male dogs more aware of their surroundings (distractions)?" We also defined control, independent, and dependent variables, made data tables, and came up with a hypothesis: "Female dogs will be more distracted by the metallic sound of the fork."

HOW?

Throughout this project, we’ve connected our learning and knowledge of evolution, observations, behavior, artificial/natural selection, as well as graphing.We created it by measuring the reaction of our dogs in seconds, knowing that it could help us predict which gender would be more distracted through time, and also give us a percentage to prove it.

WHAT?

Our results and graph proved wrong our hypothesis. We thought that females would be more distracted by the sound, but it appears that the opposite gender ended up being more distracted as days passed by. Throughout these three days, the female went from reacting for a longer time (0.39s) to a shorter time (0.23s), and the male from his minimum time (1.1s) to his maximum (3s). The blue dots were closer to their respective trend-line, being 88.5% predictable, as well as diminishing distraction. Thought the red ones were only showing 75% of predictability, being further away from the trend-line, and increasing in distraction.

Copy of Field Study Project

SO WHAT?

Our results are important because they finally answer our question, and mean that males are more distracted than females. We learned that dogs' ancestors, wolves, are very different from dogs, and that while it might be more intelligent overall, dogs are more socially smart.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We could extend our project by doing it in a large scale, which could be also our next step, by testing more than 1 dog for each gender. We could improve our project that way, too, because we'd gather more evidence to prove our results and confirm them.

REFERENCES/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We got our ideas from Biology class, each other, and the The people from the websites that follow. John May Bohannon, from Science Mag, Adrienne F. from petmaven, from Scholastic, Adam Miklósi from Google Books, Gargi S. Mukherjee, and Pedigree.

JUDGES FEEDBACK

This project expresses excellent scientific thinking through its experimental design and correlation to the artificial selection of dogs and their relation to wolves. It would be great moving forward to do the same experiment with a larger group of dogs to have more data to support or refute your hypothesis. Still, it is a fascinating subject and this experiment could further lead to our understanding of the first moments that dogs became domesticated.

Report abuse