THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

 

To write this section of your report you need to ask yourself what question your experiment was designed to answer. Once you come up with a clear presentation of this question, your hypothesis or expected outcome will simply be the answer you expect the results of your experiment to support (5: 101-103). In most experiments in an introductory class you will be more concerned with an expected outcome or objective of the experiment rather than a hypothesis. In such experiments your problem section might simply be a statement of the expected outcome of your procedure.

In the case of our experiment involving a simple voltaic cell, the relevant question might be something like "Does a simple voltaic cell produce an electrical current, and if so, why?" and the expected outcome that responds to this question is "Yes, because a simple voltaic cell produces an oxidation reduction reaction which involves a transfer of electrons." Since our simple voltaic cell experiment is only concerned with an expected outcome it might consist of nothing more than the following:

This experiment will demonstrate that the oxidation reduction reaction involded in a simple voltaic cell produces an electrical current that can be detected by a voltmeter.