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| Home > Science Fair Project Guide > |
Conclusions
Key Info
Your conclusions summarize how your results support or contradict your original hypothesis:- Summarize your science fair project results in a few sentences and use this summary to support your conclusion. Include key facts from your background research to help explain your results as needed.
- State whether your results support or contradict your hypothesis. (Engineering & programming projects should state whether they met their design criteria.)
- If appropriate, state the relationship between the independent and dependent variable.
- Summarize and evaluate your experimental procedure, making comments about its success and effectiveness.
- Suggest changes in the experimental procedure (or design) and/or possibilities for further study.
Overview
Your conclusions will summarize whether or not your science fair project results support or contradict your original hypothesis. If you are doing an Engineering or Computer Science programming project, then you should state whether or not you met your design criteria. You may want to include key facts from your background research to help explain your results. Do your results suggest a relationship between the independent and dependent variable?
If Your Results Show that Your Hypothesis is False
If the results of your science experiment did not support your hypothesis, don't change or manipulate your results to fit your original hypothesis, simply explain why things did not go as expected. Professional scientists commonly find that results do not support their hypothesis, and they use those unexpected results as the first step in constructing a new hypothesis. If you think you need additional experimentation, describe what you think should happen next.
Scientific research is an ongoing process, and by discovering that your hypothesis is not true, you have already made huge advances in your learning that will lead you to ask more questions that lead to new experiments. Science fair judges do not care about whether you prove or disprove your hypothesis; they care how much you learned.
Sample
Here are sample conclusions.
Conclusions Checklist
| What Makes for Good Conclusions? | For Good Conclusions, You Should Answer "Yes" to Every Question |
| Do you summarize your results and use it to support the findings? | Yes / No |
| Do your conclusions state that you proved or disproved your hypothesis? (Engineering & programming projects should state whether they met their design criteria.) | Yes / No |
| If appropriate, do you state the relationship between the independent and dependent variable? | Yes / No |
| Do you summarize and evaluate your experimental procedure, making comments about its success and effectiveness? | Yes / No |
| Do you suggest changes in the experimental procedure and/or possibilities for further study? | Yes / No |
