Scientific Method
Observations and Questions: Pay attention to the student who constantly falls asleep in class, think about why this may be happening.
Create a Hypothesis: A reasonable hypothesis would be that the student lacks getting a full night's sleep caused by a possible condition or by the student and his late-night choices.
Develop a Test for Your Hypothesis: The test will consist of (with consent) gathering personal information about the student's day, most importantly their night schedule. Also finding out if the student struggles from a condition like insomnia which would be a big reason for the student falling asleep. Ask the student to see a doctor to find out if a condition can be the cause.
Run the Test and Alter Conditions: Look at the information collected by the student about his/her sleep at night, how many times they wake up and for how long. See what the student was up too at night and see when the student falls asleep. Altered conditions would be seeing if the student is staying out later/going to sleep later causing worse sleep. Also remembering of a possible sleep condition.
Conclusion: If the information collected supports the hypothesis with evidence showing the student staying out late at night is the cause of the lack of or bad sleep, then the hypothesis is correct. If the student is going to bed at a reasonable time and still struggling to maintain a good night sleep, then other factors play a part which would falsify the hypothesis. One situation would be the student having insomnia and another being anytime the student sits in a class their brain shuts off immediately causing them to sleep.
I totally agree with your hypothesis students have bad sleeping schedules causing them to be unfocused in class. I can speak on fist hand experience that I don’t always get a full night of sleep which causes me to be sleepy all day.
ReplyDeleteTestable Hypothesis (5/5) - Yes, the hypothesized cause could be insufficient sleep.
ReplyDeleteTest (3/5) - What you are doing here is just gathering background information to see if this is a logical, reasonable hypothesized cause. You aren't really running the actual *test* of your hypothesis. To do that, you need to change the conditions of the hypothesized cause... in this case you need to increase the number of hours the student sleeps to see if that changes the results in the classroom in a predictable way.
Support (3/5) - If you find evidence that he is staying out late or has a conditions like insomnia, this just means it *could* be impacting his situation in class. But you haven't tested that hypothesis yet.
You need to change the conditions by increasing his sleep hours (or having his insomnia treated). If he sleeps more and then stays awake in class, this changed the results as predicted and supports your hypothesis.
Falsify (3/5) - If you change the conditions and make sure the student is getting enough sleep (through behavioral change or treatment of insomnia) and he STILL falls asleep in class, then you know that your hypothesis has been falsified and is wrong.
You say: "If the student is going to bed at a reasonable time and still struggling to maintain a good night sleep, then other factors play a part which would falsify the hypothesis. "
Actually, that first part of the sentence IS the falsification of your hypothesis. When you refer to "other factors", that would be all subsequent tests you could run on other factors to continue your search for the correct cause of the problem.
You aren't looking for factors that falsify the hypothesis. You are looking for a factor (or combination of factors) that DON'T falsify the hypothesis. That is the correct answer to your question.
Untestable Hypothesis (5/10) - I don't see an answer to this question or is that your last sentence? it's unclear, though both of those conditions are testable. Make sure you read the guidelines carefully and address all of the prompts clearly.