Dr. Yu-Wai Peter Lin     Office: SNHS 330

              Phone: (305)899-3226

              E-mail: plin@mail.barry.edu 

Back to Top

Major Report (150 total possible points)

Title Page: Include the title of the experiment along with your name, the date and the course title.

Introduction: (New Page) In this section you should give a clear, detailed background of the subject in question. While the hand-out has some background, it is usually no where near being complete. You should utilize other sources. This may include your textbook, review articles, and original research journal articles on the subject. The acceptable format for referencing the cited literature in the body of the text and in the reference section is given below. After your discussion of the background and your clear identification of the subject, clearly state your hypothesis or define the problem with which the laboratory exercise deals. Relate the problem addressed by the laboratory exercise to pertinent observations or information already known from the literature. (50 points possible)

Materials and Methods: Describe the materials and methods in enough detail that the work could be repeated by others. Do not go into unnecessary detail. The style of this section should resemble that in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Therefore, this section should not include simply a list of the materials used or resemble a recipe book as your lab manual does. Rather the methods should be in concise sentences and paragraphs making special note of how the protocol utilized deviated from that in the laboratory manual. Also, well known methods used without significant modification need not be described but merely cited. For example, "The amount of protein was determined by the method of Bradford (1976) using bovine serum albumin as the standard." (20 points possible)

Results: The data should be presented in a clear manner by the use of properly labelled graphs and tables. Again, consult the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for their style of presentation. The figures should have legends containing sufficient information that they can stand alone. Raw data used to generate the graphs should usually not be included. Although at times the raw material, once properly labelled, is your figure. For example, the picture of the DNA gel that shows the fragment sizes generated by the restriction enzymes, or the copy of the SDS PAGE gel that shows the molecular weight of proteins are both acceptable figures. Make sure to assign numbers to your tables (e.g. Table 1) and figures (e.g. Figure 5) so that you can call attention to important parts of the data in the text portion of the Results or Discussion section. (30 points possible)

Discussion: The purpose of this section is to discuss the meaning or significance of the results especially in light of previous studies. Therefore the literature you used in the introduction is again going to be important here to discuss how your results compare or add new insight to that previously described. It is in this section that you can interpret and speculate on the meaning of your results, especially based on the previous studies. Do your results corroborate or go against previous results? Using your background materials as a basis for argument, what do your results mean? Again be sure to properly cite references utilized using the format shown below. (45 points possible)

References: This section is an alphabetical list of all reference materials that have been cited in the report. Use the style listed below for citation in the text and in the reference section. (5 points possible)

----------------------------------------------------------------

Appropriate Methods of Citation

A. Within the text

In the body of the paper, citation to information from other sources are cited in this manner:

"Jones (2004) discovered that..........."

"..........was found by Jones and Edwards (2002) that......."

"High pressure may affect the brain functions responsible for higher student grades (Smith et al., 1999)."

B. Reference section

Jones, J.J. 2004. High temperatures affect student grades. J. Amer. Physiol. 101:122-144.

Jones, J.J. 1999. Temperature has no effect on student grades. Amer. Zool. 6:52-46.

Jones, J.J., and S. Edwards. 2003. High pressure affects student grades. Amer. Zool. 4:43-65.

Smith, R., J.J. Jones, and S. Edwards. 2000. High pressure affects brain function in vertebrates. Brain Research 47:1235-1257.

Zelnich, A.C. 2004. Environmental influences on brain function. Pp. 64-78 in D. Webster ed., Neural Systems. Jones Press, New York.

Back to Top