Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Accuracy

So the other day I got thinking, "what if all my test subjects
were the same age for the gender experiment?"
I'm guessing it will make the
results more accurate but it'll also be harder to do, what do you think?
Should I go find 15 males and females aged 15/16 or just leave it how it was?

Scientfic Sarah Signing Off

Monday, March 8, 2010

but WHAT is a reflex action?

A reflex action is a stereotyped (involuntary) motor responseelicited by a defined stimulus.

Unfortunately I only understood parts of that definition but not all of it as a whole so I prefer to go with this one, 'A reflex action is an involuntary reaction caused by a stimilus' for eg. blinking when
someone claps infront of your face or moving your hand away when you touch something very hot or cold.

As i've decided that my SRP will be based on reflex actions I thought it would be best to decide what exactly I'm going to base my experiments on, lately i've been tossing up between age and gender but then I thought "wouldn't testing it on both make it even more accurate?" Then I could narrow it down to what age group and which gender has the fastest reflex actions. So there's my aim:

"To find out which age group and gender has the fastest reflex actions"

Another question though Ms Zhang, does that mean I need 30 separate groups of people for each experiment? Or can I use the same people and get it over and done with all at once?

Scientific Sarah Signing Off

Thursday, March 4, 2010

a thankyou to older sisters


Thanks to my sisters' handy input I am now re-thinking how I'm going to go about doing my experiment. I'm considering testing reflex actions on the basis of age instead of gender or possibly even doing both. I also have to find various other ways of testing it so that I can come to a more accurate conclusion. I'm getting really excited about this, my creative juices are flowing!

Scientific Sarah Signing Off

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

progress!


I'm very happy to announce that I started my research a while ago and I was lucky enough to find some information related to my topic. For my SRP i've been wanting to focus on reflex actions between males and females. I'm hoping to test this out on 15 males and 15 females ranging from 14-25 by using tests such as the ruler drop. This will involve me dropping a 30cm ruler from above the subjects' hand and measuring how many cm have passed before they catch it. I'm also hoping to find a few more ways of testing this but so far this is the only website I can find that has helped me in any way. Do you think the site looks ok Ms Zhang?


I'm going to try and update as often as I can in order to get this SRP started.


P.S. I also wanted to try the experiment where you hit the subjects' knee and see if it moves/reacts but i'm not sure if that will help me with my topic, thoughts?


Scientific Sarah Signing Off