Earlier in this project your group planned a heating or cooling fair test and ran the first trial. One reading can fool us. Why do scientists run a test more than once before they trust the answer?

One ice-cube time can be a fluke (a one-off lucky or unlucky result that never shows up again), like an 8-minute melt that never happens twice. That is why we repeat.

If Trial 1 and Trial 2 disagree, what should a careful scientist do next?

Run your fair test again. Follow these steps:

1. Open your Investigation Journal page and Investigation Journal pages from earlier in this project.
2. Set up the same fair test: same thing changed, same thing measured, everything else kept the same. Use the measure or fixed observation window already written on your planner.
3. Run Trial 2. Write the reading on your Investigation Journal page straight away.
4. Reset fully. Run Trial 3. Write that reading on your Investigation Journal page straight away.
5. Stay on the Investigation Journal page only. Do not use the Results and Conclusion page yet.

Now open your Results and Conclusion page. Work through this checklist:

1. Copy only the trial readings that used the same measure and the same window.
2. Write the middle value (three matching trials) or the pattern from two matching trials.
3. Did the prediction hold? Write what the numbers show.
4. Add one way you would improve the test next time.

This is the exciting bit: every group's trustworthy number on one picture. Let's see what story the whole class tells.

We will put each group's number on the interactive activity. We only compare groups that measured the same thing in the same way. Ice-wrap groups and warm-cup groups (or different windows) go up as separate runs, announced before we type. Watch the bars grow. Which result stands out in this run? What does the chart let us see that one notebook page cannot?