Experiments, Teamwork & Collaboration
A student should be able to design appropriate experiments and prepare the requisite reagents as well as conduct the experiment (with whatever necessary skills are involved). They should understand the concept of a control, how to design controls into their experiments, and to understand what each control signifies or measures. Their experiments may involve teamwork or collaboration with another research group. They should be able to accurately record all necessary details of their experiments so that others can reproduce their work. They should understand the difference between collecting replicates of data for given samples in an experiment, and the need to reproduce the whole experiment.
Rubric for Experiments and Collaboration:
What is good experimental evidence?
The quality of your overall research project depends not only on the justification for the project and quality of the hypothesis but perhaps most importantly on the quality of the experimental evidence that you will collect and present.
The experimental evidence that is collected during the project is:
Well recorded
If you do not have an accurate record of your experiments, neither you nor anyone else will be able to reproduce your results, an essential part of the scientific approach is to keep accurate records of your experiments (how they are conducted) and the primary data that they yield. You should be collecting replicates of measurements- record both the primary data and the meta data in your notebook
Reliable and repeatable, by you, or by others
Careful technique (eg pipetting) will give you the best chance of getting reliable data- replicates will have small error bars (standard error or deviation)- remember 4 and 12 are numbers, 4+/-1 and 12+/-2 are statistically different numbers at a high degree of confidence, 4+/-3 and 12+/-7 could easily be part of a single normal distribution and not significantly different.
Usually error bar magnitude decreases as the number of replicates increases- more is better!
Repeatability is when you, or any other competent science student, does the experiment over, you (they) get the same results and draw the same conclusions. This depends on you carefully recording all aspects of your experiment so it can be faithfully reproduced, as well as conditions such as temperature, pH, buffer salt etc
Avoids systematic error and bias
Many experiments employ a lot of repetitive pipetting, or stock solutions that may “age” which can lead to systematic errors being introduced to your experiment- the reagent you made up at the start of the experiment may have degraded over the course of the experiment and the concentration you had planned at the start may be significantly different at the end. The enzyme stock solution you started with may have lost activity during the course of the day. These sort of unintended events can lead to systematic error being introduced into your experiment A well designed experiment will contain design elements that have the potential to reveal whether such problems are occurring.