Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

HOW ACCURATE ARE PEOPLE AT JUDGING TEMPERATURE?ANY IDEAS ON THE TOPIC AND THE DISPLAY BOARD SETUP FOR A 3RD.GRADER.?

Ms. Williams,

I assume that your third grade child would like to do a project about people's perception of temperature? If so, then I provide the following. If I am incorrect, please provide more information so that I can help you more effectively.

Humans are not designed to be thermometers; that is, we generally cannot tell the temperature of an object (e.g. 372 Kelvins). People can however, can tell relative temperatures (e.g. one object is cooler than another). The perception of relative temperature varies from individual to individual.

I think it would be very interesting to ask a group of people to report their opinion of the temperature of a set of objects/liquids and then compare the groups' responses to the actual temperature of the object/liquid, given by a thermometer. It may also be interesting to look at differences based on gender, age, etc.

Hi Michelle,

There are some good resources elsewhere on the Science Buddies website about How to do a Science Project (including setting up the Display board) see
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... thod.shtml
and the links that follow from that page.

Terik has some good ideas as always. And the point about relative temperatures is an important one. The temperature can feel different depending on your current temperature exposure - for example a water bath maintained at 40C might feel cold to fingers that were just in a water bath that was 50C. But the same 40C water might feel hot to fingers that were in ice for a minute before testing. So you might want to incorporate that into your experiment or you might want to make sure that you keep the background temperature constant and not test the estimating of different temperatures too close together.

Post back with some of you and your childs ideas about designing the experiment together - posting them to the Life Science board might get more specific help explaining how humans feel temperatures. While its great that you can help and guide them a little its important that they really drive the project and test out their own ideas.

Best of luck,
Caroline