Reflection Reports
Overview
Research teams are required to submit a reflection report every other week. 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 an 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.
These reports should take significant effort, time and thought. We anticipate that each team member on average should spend about an hour every two weeks with writing or editing. Supporting data and/or code should be uploaded as separate documents, but the report itself should be easily understood without having to look at the supporting documents.
The report should include the following sections with some flexibility based on the scope of your project:
- 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 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 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.
We have also provided guiding questions to assist you in your writing.
Stand-alone Document
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 e-mail the reflection report to the Team Leader and Monroe by Friday at 5 PM. Due dates for these reports can be found on the current semester syllabus. Late reports will be penalized 10% each school day that they are not turned in.
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 to the wiki. See the wiki organization guide for directions on how to post documents.