Statistics Project                                                                                                    B. Woods

Project Report

There are eight principal sections to your Statistics Project report (or in any report of experimental or observational work): Title/Cover Page, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion, References and, Appendix. Sometimes you may have an Acknowledgements section as well.

This is to include the title of your project, your name, the date, the words Statistics II Project or Biometry Project, and my name.

This is a short, concise summary of the aims and major findings of your project. The idea is to provide the reader with a quick overview of what you’ve done and what is interesting about your project so that s/he can decide whether they want to go into further detail or not. Abstracts are generally a half-page paragraph or less.

The Introduction should set the scene for all that follows. Its principal objective is to set out: (a) the background to the study, which means any theoretical or previous experimental/observational work that led to the hypotheses being tested. Background information is likely to include references to previously published work and sometimes a critical review of competing ideas or interpretations. It should also include; (b) a clear statement of the hypotheses being tested, and (c) the rationale of the study, i.e. how its design allows the specified predictions to be tested. The Introduction should give the reader a clear idea as to why the study was carried out and what it aimed to investigate.

                    Methods (or Methods and Materials)

The Methods section is perhaps the most straightforward. Nevertheless, there are some important points to bear in mind. Chief among them is providing enough detail for someone else to be able to repeat what you did exactly.

Data Collection. This should include details of all the important decisions that were made about collecting the data but not the data itself.

The Results section is in some ways the most difficult to get right. Many students regard it as little more than a dumping ground for all manner of summary and, worse, raw data. Explanation, where it exists at all in such cases, frequently consists of an introductory ‘The results are shown in the following figures…’ and a terminal ‘Thus it can be seen that…’. A glance at any paper in a journal will show that a Results section is much more than this. At the other extreme, explanation within the Results often drifts into speculative interpretation, which is more properly the province of the Discussion section (see below).

A Results section should do two things and only two things: first, it should present the data (almost always in some summarized form, of course) necessary to answer the questions posed; and second, it should explain and justify the analytical approach taken so that the reasons for choice of test and modes of data presentation are clear. The section should include a substantial amount of explanatory text, but explanation should be geared solely to the analyses and presentation of data and not the interpretations or conclusions that might be inferred from them.

It is also important that all the analyses and presentations of data involved in the report appear in the Results section (as figures, tables, or in the text) and only in the Results section. No analysis should appear in any other section.

The Discussion is the place to comment on whether the results support or refute the hypotheses in question and how they relate to the findings of other studies. The Discussion involves interpretation and reasonable speculation, with further details about the materials investigated and any corroborative/contradictory/background information as appropriate. While the Discussion may flesh out, comment, compare and contrast, it should not bring in any new analysis. Neither should it develop background information that is more appropriate to the Introduction section (see earlier).

Your report should be referenced fully throughout, with references listed chronologically in the text and alphabetically in a headed Reference section at the end. Reference styles vary enormously between different kinds of reports so there is no one accepted format. However, the Council of Biological Editors (CBE) style is used very widely and modified to suit specific journals.

Your raw data and our six-step procedure including the details of your mathematical calculations are to be included here.

If you worked with someone or for someone or if your data are a result of another course, you need to thank those people who assisted you in your project.

 

Literature cited:

1. Asking Questions in Biology by Barnard, Gilbert, & McGregor

2. Professors Potter & Knupp