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This document should make sense to an a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara and is majoring in a different field of engineering.
Expectations
A reflection report is a written document in Microsoft Word that reflects the high level of effort and professionalism expected in the engineering profession. Spelling and grammatical errors should be eliminated. Your team is expected to follow the formatting guidelines dictated on this page and utilize your best judgment when writing these reflections.
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- Literature review - Discuss what is already known about your research area. Connect your objectives with what is already know and explain what additional contribution you intend to make.
- Methods - Explain the techniques you have used to acquire additional data and insights. The techniques should be described in sufficient detail so that another researcher could duplicate your work.
- Analysis - Connect your work to fundamental physics/chemistry/statics/fluid mechanics or whatever field is appropriate. Analyze your results and compare with theoretical expectations or if you have not yet done the experiments, describe your expectations based on established knowledge.
- Conclusions - Explain what you have learned and how that influences your next steps. Make sure that you defend your conclusions. (this is conclusions, not opinions!)
- Future work - Describe your plan of action for the next several weeks of research.
It is common for students to draft reports that are too easy to create a report that is full of opinions and unsubstantiated conclusions. Defend your conclusions using your engineering skills. If you have an opinion (hypothesis) that you wish to include, explain how you will test your hypothesis.
Formatting
The file name shall be "Report team name semester year.doc". For example, the foam filtration report name would be "Report Foam Filtration Spring 2011.docx"
The documents you submit will be word documents uploaded to the wiki. Before you upload your word document, ensure that you follow instructions on the Wiki Organization Guide. All formatting should follow Grammar Guidelines for Reports. Before you begin writing, check out the Styles and Captions Formatting Template for Reports in Word.
Each report should have a cover page including the team name, team member names, and date. You will also identify primary responsibilities/roles and who is fulfilling which role in these two weeks (i.e. data analysis, experimental operation). To help facilitate knowledge transfer and learning, these roles should rotate throughout the semester so that every person does not just have experience, but is competent with all aspects of team success.
You will also identify who contributed to writing and who contributed to editing and indicate the primary author and primary editor. These roles are also rotating, and it is expected that everyone should be primary author or editor once in a semester.
Research Formatting
Utilize a pre-formatted template when writing these reflection reports that includes the style commands needed for appropriate formatting shown in the accompanying example text.
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Posting Files on the Wiki
When you receive your file back with comments and a grade, make the appropriate corrections (remove the grade!) and then upload your file Post the file as submitted to the wiki. See the wiki organization guide for directions on how to post documents.
Revision Process
Each submission of the reflection report is cumulative and must be a revision (with track changes turned on) of the previously submission. Each contributor to the report must use their own username and initials in the Word options dialog box so that it is apparent who has contributed to the document. All comments from the reviewer must be left in the document and the team should address all comments by either making change to the report or by adding comments.