Hello Curious Cannonball Flowers!
I hope you had a great Spring Break and are happy to come back to cool results from your experiment. Your graphs look impressive. You are lucky to have a successful experiment. As I have mentioned earlier, that…
moreHello Curious Cannonball Flowers!
I hope you had a great Spring Break and are happy to come back to cool results from your experiment. Your graphs look impressive. You are lucky to have a successful experiment. As I have mentioned earlier, that does not happen every time even to scientists. Of course, your hard work and interest in setting up a good experiment played a big role. Congratulations and well done!!!
FIGURES
Overall, your figures have all the elements that a good figure should have. Some refining can make them even better. If there is time you could work on formatting both your graphs in the same way to make comparisons between the two plants species (Corn and Soy) easier. For example, you could use the same color scheme for the different treatments. Also, is the y-axis simply the height of plants or have you plotted the average heights? It is important to be as accurate as possible. Please do check the x-axis label too for the corn, is it days or amount of salt?
INTERPRETING DATA AND MAKING CONCLUSIONS
The next and final steps of your scientific-inquiry are as important as the preceeding steps. First, you need to interpret your data. Of course, your graph helps you do that, and will also help others not familiar with your experiment do that. But, it is important to provide YOUR interpretation in words so that a reader gets the right message from your graphs. You have been given a very good document by your teacher that explains the different parts of your conclusion. I would follow that in the order in which it is provided. It is the same format we use as scientists.
Below I have included some points that you may want to put extra thought in to so that the results and importance of your study are well-highlighted.
1. Follow the right order in your conclusion by starting from specific information and then going broad. First explain trends from your graphs (remember, trends, not the details of every treatment that can be seen in the graphs). Then, state whether the trends support your prediction. Finally, state whether your experiment addresses your question. If so, what is the answer to your question. Going in this order is important because it allows readers to understand how you reached your conclusion.
2. Discuss and provide biological processes that could have led to the outcome you got. Why do you think plants grew in some or the other way under your different treatments? Does it have something to do with how plants take-up water? Or, could it be something else? There could be multiple possible reasons. You won't know which one, but you can speculate. Depending on your results, you will be narrowing down to a few possible biological processes involved in how salinity affects plant growth. This is important is guiding future research.
3. Discuss and include what you and others can learn from your experiments about (1) the plant species you used (corn and soy) and (2) plants in general. Here you want to be broad, but you also want to make sure the points are related to the question you asked at the beginning.
4. Finally, it is important to know and show that conclusions may change if experiments are done with a larger sample size, under different conditions, or using different plant varieties. To make sure no one considers conclusions as facts, scientists make sure to use words in their sentences that highlight the uncertainty associated with the inferences and speculation. For example, instead of writing "plants grew best under xx conditions because ...." it is better to state "plants grew best under xx conditions likely because ..."
I hope these points help you wrap-up your project. I can't wait to see the your conclusions. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best
Shivani