Research Reports
Overview
Research teams are required to submit a research report approximately every other week, or as noted on the syllabus. The exercise is not intended to add extra work, but rather facilitate a joint team effort of learning and reflection.
Target Audience
This document should make sense to a senior engineer at Cornell who is unconnected to AguaClara.
Expectations
A reflection research report is a written document 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 reflectionsreports. Your reports should always have a designated Report Proofreader; this individual is responsible for ensuring that there are no spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors. Different individuals on your team can hold this role over the course of the semester, but be sure to note who holds that role in each report that you submit.
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The report should include the following sections with some flexibility based on the scope of your project:
- Abstract - Summarize the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions of your subteam. 100 words max.
- Introduction - Explain
- Your detailed task list. You should keep and update your detailed task list from the first assignment in each of your reports. Denote completed tasks and modify your deadlines to reflect your most recently completed progress and any delays.
- 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.
- Introduction - Explain how your completion of your challenge will affect AguaClara and our mission of providing safe drinking water (or sustainable wastewater treatment!). If this is a continuing team, how will your contribution build upon previous research? What needs to be further discovered or defined? If this is a new team, what prompted the inclusion of this team?
- 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.
- 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.
- Methods 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.
- Experimental Apparatus - Explain your apparatus setup using enough detail such that future teams can recreate your apparatus.
- Procedure - Discuss your experimental procedure to explain how you ran your experiment, what you were testing, and the values of relevant parameters.
- Results and Analysis 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. Include implications of your results. How will your results influence the design of AguaClara plants? If possible provide clear recommendations for design changes that should be adopted.
- 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.
- References - Cite all references your team used here.
- Task Map and Task List - You should keep and update your detailed task list from the first assignment in each of your reports. Denote completed tasks and modify your deadlines to reflect your most recently completed progress and any delays.
- Manual - Provide all of the guidance that would be necessary for future teams to pick your work up where you left off.
It is 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
Here is a template that can be used directly to build a research report.
Research reports will be written in Overleaf. The final submission at the end of the semester will be a PDF of the report and a read-only link to the Overleaf Project uploaded to the subteam wiki page.
Starting with Overleaf
Research Report Template - Use this template to build your reports
- Overleaf Training
The file name shall be "Report <team name> <semester> <year>". For example, the foam filtration StaRS Filter Theory report name would be "Report _Foam_Filtration_Fall_2011"StaRS Filter Theory Spring 2016"
If for some reason you need to switch to a new Overleaf document or the template changed significantly, copy and paste relevant source code from the old report to the new report (this keeps all comments)
The documents you submit will be Google docs uploaded to your folder in the AguaClara Google Drive. You should email your research advisor informing him/her that of the file path once uploaded. All formatting should follow Grammar Guidelines for Reports.
Each report should include 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.
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The report must be a stand-alone document. Important equations must be documented and explained. Variables used in equations must also be labeled. Include visual figures of theoretical and experimental results whenever possible with accompanying explanations of how these are related to your research or design.
Submission
You must upload your reflection report to the AguaClara server in your teams file by the By the end of the night on Friday (by 11:59 PM), e-mail your advisor and cc all of your group members with the
- link to your report
midnight). Directions on how to connect to the server can be found here. Due dates for these reports can be found on the current semester syllabus. Late reports will be penalized 10% each day that they are not turned in.
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Each submission of the reflection report is cumulative and must be a revision (with track changes turned on) of the previously submission. All comments from the reviewer must be left in the document and the team should address all comments by either making changes to the report or by adding comments. The reviewer will accept changes and delete comments that have been addressed so the report doesn't get too messy with the track changes function. Save a new version of the overleaf document every time you submit the report.
Grading
The following rubric breaks down how all reports are calculated. Your advisor will include this table and your team's score in each category for each report.
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Effort toward objectives (is the team on track to complete their tasks or at least to make excellent progress?)
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20%
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Data and insight used effectively to direct the research path. Are you following the scientific method? Are you justifying your decisions based on engineering analysis?
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20%
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Formatting (Figures after first reference, images that load correctly, well formatted graphs, use of math editor for equations)
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20%
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Background and Literature review (Are you building on prior work as much as possible?)
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20%
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Technical writing (clear, concise, good transitions, context, accurate, logical. Did you proofread the paper as a very critical reviewer? Is every word, phrase, and sentence accurate and concise?)
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20%
| Section | Percent |
|---|---|
Style | 15% |
Abstract | 5% |
Introduction | 5% |
Literature Review | 5% |
Previous Work | 5% |
Methods | 20% |
Results | 15% |
| Analysis | 15% |
| Conclusions | 5% |
| Future Work | 5% |
| Manual | 5% |
| Total | 100% |
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Total
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