Module 2

Research question

Now that you've picked your research topic, it's time to develop your research question and hypothesis! Your research question is the question that you will try to answer in your investigation. Your hypothesis is your prediction or guess about what might happen in your investigation.

How do scientists come up with a research question?

A great research question can come from your own observations and/or building on previous research.

Observations: Sometimes research questions come from things that we observe in our day-to-day lives. While playing with a younger cousin or sibling, you might notice that something that seems easy for you is harder for them, like counting or sharing. This might make you wonder how these skills develop over time. Or, you might notice that when you are focusing on your homework or a fun game, you pay less attention to the sounds, sights, and smells around you. This might make you curious about how our brains decide which information to pay attention to. Wonder and curiosity about how or why things happen can help you pick a research question!

Building on previous research: Other times, you might start by learning about something that other people have already started studying, as you did in Module 1. Even though scientists have learned a lot, there is still so much we do not know! You can design a research question to build on what has already been studied. When you read about the topics in Module 1, what questions do you have? What seems to be missing? Your research question can add new information to previous research!

Even if you started with an observation, it's important to read some previous research to see what already might be known about your topic! This will help you plan your hypotheses. Keep reading below for how to design a research question and make your hypotheses.

Checking our roadmap:

• In Module 3, you'll decide what research method is best for answering your question. Maybe you will interview scientists who study this topic, or maybe you will review some other studies that other scientists did. You might also want to design your own study to collect new data.

• The poster you create in Module 5 will have an Introduction that tells your reader what you observed that made you interested in this topic and what we already know about the topic from previous research. You'll work with your mentor to describe the previous research on your topic so that your audience understands why you picked your research question.

Now let's work through an example of a research topic, research question, and hypothesis! In this example, you are interested in understanding what makes children share with each other.

First, ask your research question in a way that makes it testable. A research question is testable when it can be answered through an observation or experiment. Developmental scientists sometimes ask children to split a bowl of candy, keeping some for themselves and sharing some with someone else. You can take a look at the picture above to see how they set up their experiment!

Afterwards, they can measure or observe how much candy a child shared. Sometimes, children might share all of the candy equally, but other times, they might keep more for themselves. You can observe this!

Your research question could be "Does a child share candy equally well with their siblings and their friends?"

Second, identify your independent and dependent variables. An independent variable is the thing that you change in your experiment. A dependent variable is the thing you want to observe or test in your experiment.

In this example, your independent variable is who a person is sharing with (sibling or friend). Your dependent variable is the amount of candy they share with each person.

Let's continue with the research topic of the sharing with different people. After developing your research question, you will develop your hypotheses.

Consider all of the possible answers to your research question. Each possible answer is called a hypothesis:

• 1. "Children share the same amount of candy with siblings and friends", or

  2. "Children share more candy with siblings than friends", or

  3. "Children share more candy with friends than siblings"

You might notice that hypothesis #1 is different. Hypothesis #1 is called the null hypothesis, and this is the possible outcome that shows that it doesn't matter who a child is sharing with. Notice that hypothesis 2 and 3 are the opposite of each other!

How do you know which of your three hypotheses is true? Observe the results of your experiment!

Thinking like a scientist: If you were to do this experiment for real, you would ask more than one person to be in your study. Maybe you would have 50 people share M&Ms and take their average. That way, you know that you didn't just observe one strange person!

In this module, you learned how to write a research question that is testable, and you saw how you can use an experiment to decide which of your hypotheses are true!

We hope this helped you to start thinking like a developmental scientist! What questions do you want to answer? Your UMN mentor will help you develop an observable, testable research question.