PLTW Medical Detectives Practice Exam

Experimental design is the structured plan you use to run experiments in a way that can reliably answer a scientific question. It involves deciding what to test, which variables to compare, how to control other factors, how many samples to study, and how you’ll collect and analyze the data. This planning helps ensure that any observed differences are due to the factor you’re investigating, not random variation or other influences, making the results trustworthy and reproducible. The term described here refers to this overall approach to arranging and conducting the investigation. The word “valid” is not the name of a planning framework, “experiments” describe the activities themselves rather than the planning process, and the independent variable is the factor you change within the design, not the entire planning framework.