In this writing assignment, you will demonstrate your understanding of the organization of scientific research papers. The research paper will focus on your experiments with barnacles, and it will include all standard research paper sections (introduction, methods, results and discussion).
The research paper should have the structure below:
Introduction:
The purpose of an introduction is to prepare the reader for what is to come in the remainder of the paper. This means the introduction should include any background information necessary for a typical reader to understand the experiment and explain the significance of the experiment. Several sentences should also be included to explain specifically what the experiment was investigating, along with the author’s hypothesis.
Methods:
The purpose of this section of the paper would be for someone else to be able to replicate your work. Be sure to include any steps necessary to complete the experiment. This should not be a prepared list of steps. Instead, it should summarize the steps in paragraph form. Your methods should be detailed enough that someone could conduct your experiment from these instructions.
Results:
This section should present the key results that you obtained. Do not include a table showing every number/data point that you collected. Instead, summarize the results in a short paragraph (could be as short as a sentence or two) and illustrate them in a clear graph (computer generated with Excel or comparable program) with appropriate labels and captions. The reader should be able to look at the graph and know what happened during the experiment without really having to read your written results. The results should be clearly separated from the discussion.
Discussion:
In the discussion, the most important thing to remember is that the discussion is NOT just a re-wording of the experimental results. The discussion section usually begins by quickly re-stating the hypothesis and the results, and then it dives deeper into the meaning and interpretation of the results. This section is used to discuss or explain why the results do or don’t fit the initial hypothesis, as well as, any limitations of the experiment. If the results were unexpected, this section may suggest possible reasons why this may occurred. Furthermore, if there are practical applications or improvements that could be made to the experiment, this would be the place to make that known. The discussion is usually the most difficult of all the sections of a lab report because it requires the author to synthesize/process all the aspects of the experiment.
Your submission should be 3-4 pages in length.
You will need to include a minimum of four sources properly cited in APA format.
