Marie notices that the current cleaner she is using on her shower is not cutting through the hard water build-up that has accumulated. She decides to purchase 3 other cleaners to see if one of them will do a better job of cutting through the stains. Marie places masking tape in the dry shower to create 5 sections for her experiment. She sprays one cleaner per section and leaves the remaining section untouched to compare her results. After 30 minutes, and without scrubbing any of the cleaner in, she records her observations. In this example, what is the dependent variable?

The dependent variable in an experiment is the variable that the experimenter measures. It is the variable that responds to changes made to the independent variable.

In this experiment, Marie conducted an experiment to test which cleaner will do a better job of cutting through the stains (hard water buildup). She measures the cut through the stain, hence, the CUT is the dependent variable, which is dependent on the cleaner used.