Order 2303456: the effect of bean type amount of egg laid by female bean bettles

Copyright Stephen Burnett, 2009-2019, Clayton State University, Morrow, GA. Do not copy or use this document without permission.

Objectives

Upon completion of this exercise, you will be able to:

1. Properly read or write a discussion section for a scientific paper.

Introduction

The final section of a scientific paper is the Discussion (or Conclusion) section. In this section, you summarize past research, your results, and the implications for your hypothesis. This is the section where you interpret the information that you have accumulated and suggest future research that could/should be done. This is the section in the paper where you have the most freedom to make speculation, but it is important that you keep your speculations within reason!

Because you are addressing both your specific results and the wider implications of those results, you always want to start this section with the specific information from your experiments, then move on to the general ideas, where you discuss what your results mean in the big picture. You need to address every variable you measured in your experiment. If you address it in the methods section, you need to address it here as well, even if it’s to say that the particular variable wasn’t important/significant. Your results should be the foundation for your argument so it is vital that you interpret them correctly or everything else will be inaccurate. However, it’s also important that you limit your conclusions to things that your data can support. This means it’s generally best to be conservative when you interpret your data so that you don’t overextend your results!

The first thing you do in this section is refer back to your original hypothesis and predictions for your experiment and state why your results did or did no support them. Remember, supporting or not are the only possible options. We never prove or disprove our ideas and it is also not possible partially support them.

Part of your job in this section is to try and convince others who might doubt your results that your conclusions are a sound way to interpret those results. As such you need to provide a convincing argument, however, you must avoid the temptation to simply point out data that agreed with your ideas. Data that contradicts your ideas is something that others will notice and if you fail to address it, they will discount your conclusions as a result. Also avoid making “excuses” for why the results do not support your hypothesis. Students often feel the need to make the data match their hypothesis even when this is clearly not the case. In science, it is more common to be wrong than to be right, so there is no problem with having a hypothesis that isn’t supported, and there are no points off on your grade in this class! This extends to the desire that students feel to provide the sources of “error” that caused problems in their experiment. While errors do occur, you should only bring them up if you have evidence they occurred – suggesting that an error might have occurred is unscientific and not helpful. If you mention problems/errors in earlier parts of the report, you should definitely address them here.

In this section, it is important to think towards the future. In this section you would need to provide suggestions for future questions or areas of study that were brought up by your results. When you make this suggestion, you do not need to have all the details for the experiment you would do, but you have to provide enough to make it clear what you would do and why it is relevant. The experiment you provide also needs to make sense in the context of the topics you addressed. If you have a report that addresses multiple experiments, then each section of the report needs to have suggestions for future research. These suggestions must be for experiments you haven’t done already. This means that if you write up a report that includes two experiments in it, your follow-up suggestion for experiment 1 cannot be to suggest doing what you did in experiment 2.

Next, you need to use this section to discuss larger issues than you addressed directly. It is important that you do this in a focused way – there are many topics that you could include that aren’t important/relevant to what you did, so you need to avoid going overboard. One important thing that you should do is tie your results to what other researchers who did similar/related experiments found. This will often include the references you used to provide background in your introduction, but it might refer to other studies as well. Do your results agree with those references or do they differ and why do you think that happened? When referring to other research it is important to put the information in your own words – scientific writing does not use quotations. Plagiarism is also a concern if you don’t fully understand what you are citing, so you want to be careful to avoid things that will cost you points or have worse repercussions. You also need to make sure you Also it is common for a lab report to address multiple experiments. In such a case you would use this section to tie together all the experiments, explain what you learned by looking at all of them, what you better understand overall as a result, etc.

Lastly, you need to tie your results into the “big picture” that you were addressing. This would include how your results fit into the larger understanding of the organisms you were studying, why those are important, and how our understanding is changed by them.

One last thing you can consider as you finish your lab report is how well the ideas flow and follow the standard format. Overall a well-written lab report should have a symmetrical, hourglass shape, where the width of the particular portion specifies how broad the information should be. Narrow sections represent items that are specific to your project, while wider parts represent areas where you should be talking about material that fits into a broader context (Figure 1).

Figure 1: the “hourglass” model of a lab report. Width of the red section corresponds to how broad that material is in that section. Each section of the report is marked with yellow brackets. For sections that vary in width, some indication has been given to indicate where a particular portion fits in.

Thinking Like a Scientist – Part 4 – Page 1