Research Reflection Guidelines
The following wiki page is intended to help teams who have an established experimental method/apparatus and are collecting data.
The following format and guiding questions for your report can be found below. Follow the Grammar Guidelines for Reports page.
Abstract
Briefly summarize your previous work, goals and objectives, what you have accomplished, and future work. (100 words max)
Introduction
Explain how the completion of your challenge will affect AguaClara and our mission of providing safe drinking water (or sustainable wastewater treatment!)
Have you stated your theory and hypothesis?
Briefly explain your experiment / process and why you performed this experiment?
- Briefly explain why your work is important? What is the purpose of your research?
Literature Review
Discuss what is already known about your research area. Connect your objectives with what is already known and explain what additional contribution you intend to make.
Have you looked at relevant literature outside of the AguaClara program?
Has a similar experiment been done before?
- Have you cited your sources in APA format using Zotero?
Previous Work
Discuss what is already known about your research area based on the work of AguaClara subteams. Connect your objectives with what past teams discovered and explain what additional contribution you intend to make. Make sure to add APA formatted in text citations.
Have you looked at past teams’ reports?
What did they do? Why are their findings and processes important to your research?
Did they have a similar purpose, apparatus, or perform a similar experiment?
- Have you cited your sources properly?
Methods
In the experimental design section, include as much detail as possible for how you conducted each experiment and any processes or methods that you changed. Document these changes. The following are guiding questions to assist you in writing this section:
- What are the experiments you planned to conduct that would allow you to test these hypotheses?
- List the variables for each experiment. Which variables are you varying and which ones are you holding constant? What are the ranges that you are testing?
- Were there any modifications to experimental methodology? If there were any, describe them. Reference a process control file or provide a modified diagram of the experimental reactor.
First Iteration:
Experimental Apparatus: Design, Schematic, Materials, Calculations, Construction Procedure
Can future team members recreate your apparatus and experiments? Is it easy to understand for someone unconnected to AguaClara?
Are all of the design parameters justified?
Have you shown sample calculations?
Have you used appropriate figures that help explain your apparatus?
ProCoDA Methods: States, Variables, Revisions
Did you include relevant information from your ProCoDA code?
Procedure
Are you justifying your decisions based on engineering analysis?
Are all decisions justified?
Are you confident in your justification?
Other Iterations:
Experimental Apparatus: Design, Schematic, Materials, Calculations, Construction Procedure
How was the apparatus from the last iteration modified?
Show any new relevant figures and calculations where needed.
Provide sufficient detail so that a new AguaClara project team could duplicate the research
ProCoDA Methods: States, Variables, Revisions
How was the ProCoDA code from the last iteration modified?
Did you include a clear description of what your ProCoDA code does?
Procedure
What aspect of your procedure did you change from previous research? Describe these changes in detail.
Are all decisions justified? Are you justifying your decisions based on engineering analysis?
Are you confident in your justification?
Are the revisions to the experimental approach for each new iteration clear? Why did you make these changes. What is the goal of the change?
Discussion:
First Iteration:
Discussion: Results and Analysis
Have you discussed your results in a way that is easy to understand?
What did you discover. What insight do these results give you?
- How will you incorporate this new knowledge to improve your method for the next iteration?
Other Iterations:
Discussion: Results and Analysis
Have you discussed your results in a way that is easy to understand?
What did you discover. What insight do these results give you?
- How will you incorporate this new knowledge to improve your method for the next iteration?
Conclusion:
In the results section, present a summary of your results in a professional way and then analyze these results. When analyzing results, think about how the results support or do not support your original hypotheses and motivation to run the experiment. The following are guiding questions to assist you in writing this section:
- Show your experimental data in a professional way. Refer to Grammar Guidelines for Reports for details on formatting.
- What results do you get from the data?
- Does the data support your hypothesis? Why does it support or not support it?
- Are there new insights that you get from this data?
- If the data does not support your hypothesis, is there another hypothesis that describes your new data?
Future Work
Based upon what you learned and your current hypothesis/es, what new experiments do you propose to conduct for the next two weeks? Try to set reasonable goals, but also challenge yourselves to set high expectations.
What’s next?
How can AguaClara apply what you discovered for future projects?
- Should research in this area continue?
Team Reflections
The team reflection section is very important in assessing not only your efficiency and productivity, but how well you are learning:
- Are there concepts or ideas that your team needs help with?
- Did your team accomplish what you set out to do?
- If not, what reasons can you give? Was it team dynamics, equipment failures, communication between the TA or professor, a lack of understanding in some concept (theoretical or otherwise) or the laboratory, or is it something else? Be very specific here so we can help your team as much as possible.