ANALYSIS

PROBLEMS:

1. Balto wouldn’t let me put the leash on.

2. Junior ran away every time we had to teach him.

3. Balto wanted to play every time.

4. We didn’t know how to build the obstacle course.

5. Hard to communicate what we wanted the dogs to do.

6. Junior wasn’t Jackie’s dog so it was hard to visit him regularly.

7. We only had two dogs and they were different kinds of dogs.

8. We did not test with older dogs or puppies.

SOLUTIONS:

1. We didn’t do the leash test with Balto – too uncooperative.

2. We gave him some days to not be scared so we could teach him.

3. We played a bit with him first then we taught lesson.

4. We asked science teacher and class to give us some ideas.

5. We modeled ourselves what we wanted them to try and do.

6. We rearranged schedule so we could make regular visits.

7. We had no solution for #7 or #8 for this experiment.

WHY DID THE IQ SCORES IMPROVE?

I think Balto improved partly because his mother helped to teach him and partly because he really became smarter.  The test was different enough from the lessons that we gave that I don’t think it was “training” him.  He might have been “trained” after doing it for the test and then he remembered it for the second test, but I doubt it.  Perhaps life made them smarter during the lesson time and it had nothing to do with lessons. Maybe it was luck.

   Future Science Fair Experiments:

1. In future science fair experiments we would do study paws do they prefer to use.

2. Test what kind of dog is smarter

3. Test which age dog is smarter.

4. What kind of food do the dogs prefer?

Did We Prove our Hypothesis?

We did not expect the dog IQ scores to improve, yet they did.  With only two sometimes uncooperative dogs, it is impossible to say whether our hypothesis is correct without a lot more testing.