Student Inquiry and Research Program Details
Scientific Investigation Final Report
When writing your Scientific Investigation final report, there is a conventional format to follow in communicating your findings to the scientific community. Below you will find a brief description of that format and the requirements of each section.
Title
The function of the title is to succinctly convey the important points uncovered by your experimentation. The title should be short and unambiguous. Creative titles may be interesting, but often fail to communicate what you have accomplished.
Abstract
Your abstract may be the same one that you submitted for the IMSAloquium abstract book. If you have done significant work on your investigation since you submitted your abstract, you may need to update your original abstract.
Introduction
The function of the introduction is to provide background and rationale for your research. Background is provided by writing a short review of the literature in the field of your inquiry research. State the hypothesis(es) being tested.
Materials and Methods
This section is used to give the procedural details of your work. It should be written so that any well-versed reader could easily repeat your experiment by following your procedure. This section is written as a narrative in the past tense, not like a recipe. You should also include descriptions of analyses performed on data.
Results
The writing in this section is often quite brief. This is where the experimental evidence is stated. Present your data; do not interpret or discuss its significance in this section. Often data are presented in a table or figure. Report your data once; do not make both a table and a figure for the same set of data. Tables and figures should be constructed so they will stand alone. This means that each table and figure needs to be titled, given labels and a figure legend, and clearly report the results of your research. The reader should be able to quickly view a table or figure and be able to draw conclusions. Within the text of this section can be found brief explanations of figures and tables as well as the presentation of other data. Report results of statistical analysis (if any). Give statistical test used, test statistic, degrees of freedom and/or sample size, significance level, and probability value.
Discussion
Interpretation of your work is done in this section. Draw conclusions from your data as well as suggest further hypotheses that can be tested to clear up any discrepancies or ambiguities. It is good to close the circle; return to the introduction section to remind the reader of the importance of your work and then state the importance of your addition to the joint knowledge of the scientific community. Relate your work to work that was done by others in the field. Were your results as expected or not? Discuss why or why not.
Investigation Process
This should be a personal statement about your journey through the investigation using inquiry standards. What did you learn about how to learn and how to direct your own learning? How did the SIR investigation, as opposed to (say) science class, help you to learn more about how science is done? Did you accomplish the task you set out to do? What path of investigation did you choose? Why did you choose that path? How did your path change? What misconceptions or problems did you overcome?
References
In your final report, it is important to give credit to your sources for the ideas and information that they have provided to you. First, this helps your reader to know all of the resources that you have used in the creation of your investigation and resulting conclusions. Secondly, it is unethical to take credit for somebody else's work, ideas, or findings under all circumstances - even if you feel that the other person wouldn't mind; doing so is called plagiarism. Plagiarism can result in lawsuits, academic dismissal, and personal disgrace. To avoid this, the convention in scientific writing is to use embedded references, not footnotes.
Appendix/Addendum
Before you conducted your investigation, did you need to construct apparatus, develop a growth curve, or standardize a protocol, for example? Document this work, supporting your investigation, in this section.