I’m no scientist, so this is really conjecture. I remember being confused as well; and in elementary and even middle school, many students were convinced the hy

I’m no scientist, so this is really conjecture. I remember being confused as well; and in elementary and even middle school, many students were convinced the hypothesis had to be the right answer, so they wouldn’t fill it out until after the experiment. But, at least at my schools, we never did any real experiment. We did demonstrations and tried to shoehorn them into the scientific method. We never started with an observation (say, mice live longer when given reduced calorie diets), worked out a hypothetical explanation for that observation, and then designed an experiment to prove or disprove our hypothesis. I’m sure that’s done at some level, but not in any science class I took.