Personal Research Project
The Personal Research Project will be a semester long project that will focus on each person's scientific questions. Each one of you has a packet to collect ideas and progress so that each step can be done easily. If you have any questions at any point, please feel free to bring in your work and we'll talk about it and get you on the right track. Here is an outline of what is expected for each section.
Introduction
This is where you decide what your research is going to be all about. I want you to pick something that really interests you. It can sports, music, cooking, gardening, whatever as long as you focus on single question and really think it through.
Please rememeber to stay away from the following things: Mold or bacteria, Dangerous activities (if you want to do something with fire come talk to me), Simple questions (no coke and mentos), human behavior and please be kind to your subjects; both people and animals.
In the Introduction you need to include the observations that lead you to ask the question. Also include the question and your hypothesis. This will be the beginning to the rest of the research.
Experimental Design
This is the fun part. At this point you can design an experiment that will test your hypothesis and put all of your research into practice. Make sure that you're detailed in every step and in your materials list. Include the brands used, how many, and how long each step should take.
Analysis and Conclusion
Now that you have conducted the experiment it’s now time to take a deep look at the data collected. The analysis is where you explain and interpret the data and figure out what it is really telling you. And this understanding helps with the conclusion.
The conclusion is where you bring everything together. There are four essential things that need to be in every conclusion. The first is to restate your hypothesis and whether you proved it or disproved it. Second, what happened during the experiment, especially if something unexpected happened. The third part is experimental error. This can be anything that might have gone wrong or might have influenced the outcome of the experiment. And the last part is the further research you could do or new questions that were sparked during the project.
Research
Once you have chosen your topic it’s now time to start researching. I would like you write a two to four page, double spaced paper. This should be a way to better understand the subject and further your knowledge.
In your Research paper you should start with the introduction that you previously turned in. Then organize your paper in a way that makes sense for your topic. Make sure that you include your resources. These resourse are not counted in the two to four pages and need to include all of the resourse you used in your paper. Remember to refence them in the paper.
Data Collection
Time to preform the experiment. This is were you use the your design to go through the experiement at least three times. This helps make sure to eliminate any experimental error and to check results. At the end of the experiement place your data in tables or graphs to make them easy and simple to read.
Final Paper and Presentation
This is very last part. The paper is quite simple. Take each section that we have already completed and place them in one document, and add heading, a title and your name and it will be ready to turn in. Don't forget to correct the issues found in the earlier sections in your final paper.
The presentation will be done on a board. I will be looking for neat and presentable presentations that include all of the parts that were previously turned in. Including pictures would help to illustrate what you did during the experiment. We will present this during one evening and all parents are invited to come and view all of the projects.
