Prompt: Design an experiment that attempts to determine whether toads can hear. Provide the rationale for your design-explain your reasons for setting up the experiment as you did. Strive for simplicity and clarity.

Something important I have learnt throughout my years in school is to be skeptical about everything I read. The Internet often contains misleading information that must be tested and researched before I can use it. Although verification was a pain, it taught me how to establish the credibility of a claim and to look at situations from different perspectives to see the whole story. 

In order to investigate the hypothesis that toads can hear, we first need to remove all external stimuli from a toad’s environment to establish a control. To do this, we can place the toad in a sealed, insulated and soundproof box, with a small speaker installed inside it, and position the box on a flat, sturdy surface.  Next, we will note the toad’s behavior when no sounds are played, then start playing sounds from quiet to loud. When the sounds are being played, we will again note the toad’s behavior. After repeating this procedure at least five times, we will compare our observations of the toad’s behavior during silence and during exposure to auditory stimuli. If the toad reacts noticeably to the sounds, we can conclude that toads can indeed hear. 

In my physics class, we are often asked to design experiments to understand how a law or principle operated. There are two main criteria in these types of assignments – accuracy and quality control. The experiment above includes repetition and only one controllable variable. The repetition helps reduce the effects of errors in the results of an experiment; experimental results become more accurate with each trial. The variable in this experiment is the loudness of the clip, chosen because toads may or may not be as sensitive to sound as humans are, so it would be helpful to have a range of volumes to test. All other factors are controlled, so the results of the experiment are unadulterated by unwanted stimuli. 

However, there are other less complicated methods to prove a toad’s ability to hear. One of these methods is to observe their daily behaviors and abilities. For example, when toads mate, they use a special mating call identifiable by only their own species, which points to not only an ability to hear, but also an ability to use their sense of hearing. 

Through school, I learned how to reach conclusions through the rigorous Scientific Methods, which is what I used to design the box-with-a-speaker experiment. But oftentimes, I learnt to reach the same conclusion from a different, simpler perspective. Being able to look at a problem from different viewpoints and approach it from multiple angles is a valuable skill set in today’s age of information; it is a sieve for the gold in the dirt.

Review: This assignment was definitely one of those that challenged me as the prompt I choose was really hard since I did not know what to write. Thinking about the prompt I was able to think more outside of the box as well as exploring the careers more with doing different prompts. While writing the essay I struggled with describing the procedure with both technical terms as well as being extremely descriptive. I feel like doing the assignment allowed me to think more critically as well as learning to describe things with a more descriptive way.

Rough Draft Version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ar6k2pqpDlZ-P29XI2dD0mnkLA2TJNF-M3aPrQih__8/edit?usp=sharing