Scientists have to decide how their results do and don’t apply to the phenomenon, making sense of differences such as scale and type of material.

Often, results help scientists identify factors that matter, but they may still be unsure about why or how those factors make a difference. They have to engage in conceptual work and may need to bring other sources of information to bear on their findings.

Scientists take findings from the investigation and use those to develop explanations, often of a more complex process than that tested.