Revision notes.

Try this with Investigating Science

1. Close your notes and write the main idea in two sentences from memory.
2. Reopen the source and correct the first mistake or omission you find.
3. Add one example and one question to test whether you can apply the idea.

View Investigating Science resources on ATARMAXXING ↗

Topics in the resource inventory

• What initiates an investigation: Marshall and Warren, Von Helmont and Spencer, and departures from the linear scientific method
• Choosing a methodology: Eratosthenes, Doppler, Priestley and Marshall and Warren, judged against the literature
• Writing a valid method: variables, controls, sample size, materials, ethics and time frame
• Validity, reliability and accuracy, drawing conclusions, and the structure of a scientific report
• Measuring technologies: accuracy, precision, resolution, data loggers, and analogue versus digital
• Random and systematic errors, uncertainty, and processing data into tables and graphs with lines of best fit
• Safe technologies: safety data sheets, Work Health and Safety guidelines and risk assessment
• The science-technology cycle: from X-ray diffraction, radiation detectors and the Large Hadron Collider to microscopes, radiotherapy, GM crops and earthquake-resistant buildings
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples' knowledge of plants and ethical bioharvesting from Country and Place
• Testing a claim: valid design, sample selection and size, and emotive versus evidence-based advertising
• Placebos, double-blind trials and control groups, and societal and economic influences on data
• Correlation is not causation: the Hawthorne effect, the 1991 hormone replacement therapy study and the Mozart Effect
• Science in the media: a contemporary debate, theory versus hypothesis versus belief versus law, and journal versus popular articles
• Conflicts of interest, the halo effect and pseudoscience: tobacco, fossil fuels, asbestos, astrology, numerology and iridology
• Fraud, 'publish or perish', peer review, cold fusion and fake journals: can science find the truth?
• Events and the public image of science: nuclear meltdowns, the smallpox vaccine, flight and damming rivers
• Why research is regulated: embryos, bioweapons, drug trials, the nuclear industry and Indigenous cultural and intellectual property
• Ethical issues and international codes of conduct: cloning, stem cells, surrogacy, GM foods and organ transplantation
• Space exploration versus social spending, research for economic development, and advances in world health
• Governments, corporations, research budgets, benefit-sharing and cultural perspectives in directing research