General Questions

• Why is your research important? How could your finding be used?
• How would you expand your research? What questions would you investigate next?
• Ask students what they thought they did well and what could be improved.

Specific Questions

Framing the Question:

What prompted you to choose this topic?

What is the question or hypothesis that you wanted to answer?

What type of research did you have to do before you began the experiment?

Did you make any initial observations or do any other experiments before you began?

How/Where did you research the scientific principals that your project is based on?

Do you have a hypothesis?

Designing the Investigation:

Please describe for me what you did for this project.

What are your controls? What are your variables?

What materials did you used? Did you have to purchase or make any of your equipment?

Did you have to modify your procedure as you did the experiment?

How did you deal with unusual situations while taking data?

Collecting and Presenting Data:

How did you organize the information/data that you collected?

Why did you choose this type of graph/chart to represent your data?

How long did you spend gathering data?

How many trials (tests of the same experiment) did you run?

Was there any “weird” data that seemed out of ordinary? Did you choose to include it?

If so, how do you explain it? If not, why did you choose to not include it?

How did you measure your data? What units of measurement did you use?

Analyzing and Interpreting Results:

Did you make any calculations using your data?

Could you see any patterns in your data?

What did you learn as a result of this project?

Does your data support your conclusion?

What were your sources of data?

What could you do to eliminate sources of error if you were to do this project again?

Did you discover something that you would like to learn more about?

Were there any results that surprised you?

If you could continue this project, what would you do next?