Writing Assignments--Methods and Results Sections

Goal: The goal of this assignment is for you to analyze the data from the pine cone/acorn lab statistically and graphically. At the same time, this exercise designed to give you experience using that data to write the methods and results sections of a scientific paper.

The methods section of a paper is meant to describe for the reader, the what, where and how features of research. The level of detail must be such as to allow the reader to replicate the experience, but yet at the same time, not so detailed as to bore the reader with unnecessary details, unless the details are essential to the description of the methodology. Unless the author has used a technique drawn from a lab guide or manual, the methods section usually does not have any citations to the scientific literature. The section is normally written in the simple past tense. It is written as a synopsis of what was done and not as directions (such as what you might find in a lab manual or cookbook).

The results section is meant to simply describe to the reader the outcomes of the research. It does not desribe implications or relationships. Those aspects are left for the discussion/conclusion sections. It typically presents the information in two formats, a written where important data items are listed and a graphical/tabular which visually shows much of the same information. There must be links between the two formats. The links might be direct, e.g., "As shown by Table 1 . . ." or indirect "The mean size of carapace varied from a low of 15.5 mm to a high of 25.3 mm (Table 1)". Tablular data is fitted into rows and columns with a label at the top of the table. Figure data are line, point or histogram charts with the label, e.g., Fig. 3, at the bottom of the chart. Results are also written in simple past tense.

Specific Directions:

Write the methods and results sections of your paper. Give your paper a title that fits the study. You do not need an introduction nor a discussion/conclusion section for the paper. There also will be no literature cited section. The title and your name should be at the topic of the page, with each subsequent section labelled by a separate descriptor that is centered on the page (e.g., METHODS, RESULTS). If it helps you can have subsections within each of the preceeding. They are also centered, but in lowercase and italicized.

Carry out the following statistical analyses with the data you collected in the field.

• Use Chi-Square to determine whether direction and distance values are what one might predict. For the direction component, pool all the data from the five quadrats in to one value, for the distance component, pool all the quadrats at the same distance into a single distance data.
• Download the following data file to determine whether acorn mass is normally distributed. Use the techniques supplied on the xerox sheets handed out two weeks ago in class.

Display the the direction and distance data in tabular form. Display the acorn mass data in chart form (as a histogram)

You can either insert the tables and figures into your word document, or you can print them out separately and attach them to the text portion.