Research Reflection Guidelines

The following wiki page is intended to help teams who have an established experimental method/apparatus and are collecting data. There are other guidelines for those in a design and development phase of research and their are guidelines for the beginning of the semester.

The following format and guiding questions for your report can be found below. Follow the Grammar Guidelines for Reports page.

Background

The background section provides a means of summarizing your previous reflection. Before writing your reflection, your team members should refer to the previous reflection with graded comments from the Research Leader and Monroe.

In the background section, provide enough detail so that you only refer to figures in past reflections, but do not provide excruciating detail as it has hopefully already been documented. For Spring 2010, think about where you were four weeks ago (if you can remember) and use this section to summarize what you were doing and thinking about then. The following are guiding questions to assist you in writing this section:

• What was your driving hypothesis/hypotheses in the previous reflection?
• What did your learn from your previous reflection and what new insights did you gain?
• Were the experimental results in your previous reflection as you anticipated? If not, why does your team think so?
• Based upon your results, what is your experimental hypothesis/es that you had wanted to test over these two weeks? Bold your specific hypothesis/es.
• Is there other evidence/knowledge that led to this hypothesis? Be specific and refer to the wiki pages, previous reports, and/or scientific literature.

Experimental Design

In the experimental design section, include as much detail as possible for how you conducted each experiment and any processes or methods that you changed. Document these changes. The following are guiding questions to assist you in writing this section:

• What are the experiments you planned to conduct that would allow you to test these hypotheses?
• List the variables for each experiment. Which variables are you varying and which ones are you holding constant? What are the ranges that you are testing?
• Were there any modifications to experimental methodology? If there were any, describe them. Reference a process control file or provide a modified diagram of the experimental reactor.

Results/Conclusions

In the results section, present a summary of your results in a professional way and then analyze these results. When analyzing results, think about how the results support or do not support your original hypotheses and motivation to run the experiment. Remember to also include somewhere a copy of your datalog and data analysis files. The following are guiding questions to assist you in writing this section:

• Show your experimental data in a professional way. Refer to Grammar Guidelines for Reports for details on formatting.
• What results do you get from the data?
• Does the data support your hypothesis? Why does it support or not support it?
• Are there new insights that you get from this data?
• If the data does not support your hypothesis, is there another hypothesis that describes your new data?

Future Work

Based upon what you learned and your current hypothesis/es, what new experiments do you propose to conduct for the next two weeks? Try to set reasonable goals, but also challenge yourselves to set high expectations.

Team Reflections

The team reflection section is very important in assessing not only your efficiency and productivity, but how well you are learning.

• Are there concepts or ideas that your team needs help with?
• Did your team accomplish what you set out to do?
• If not, what reasons can you give? Was it team dynamics, equipment failures, communication between the TA or professor, a lack of understanding in some concept (theoretical or otherwise) or the laboratory, or is it something else? Be very specific here so we can help your team as much as possible.