Scientific Research Skills - Final Assignment

Your final exam will be in the form of a Powerpoint presentation, 5-10 minutes long, based on the results of your survey.

Your presentation should include the following:

• Introduction - the topic of your survey, why you chose this topic, how many people did you survey, how did you choose your sample.
• One slide per question - include the question that you asked, and a graph of the results (if appropriate).
• Your graphs should all be a different style (column, pie, percentages, 2D/3D, colors etc)

While presenting, as well as showing your results you should try to highlight anything interesting or unusual that you found.

Research Skills - Surveys

Article - types of survey questions

Indian Women & Gender Roles survey

Questionnaire design

Animal testing assignment

Are you FOR or AGAINST animal testing in scientific research?

Back up your arguments with referenced scientific facts.

Paper should be written in APA style using the correct style of references, paraphrasing and formatting.

2 pages double spaced.

Use APA style for references.

Due May 6th.

Unit 3 - Ethics - Topic 3: Animal testing

http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/schoolzone/rights_and_wrongs/

Climate change assignment

"What should the USA do to help combat climate change?"

Discuss the following in your essay:

• Kyoto protocol
• Government policies
• Individual responsibilities and whether/how they should be enforced

Paper should be written in APA style using the correct style of references, paraphrasing and formatting.

3 pages long.

Due April 2nd.

Stem cell funding debate

Here is the PBS Newshour report on stem cell funding: Obama Lifts Restrictions on Funding Human Stem Cell Research

The topic of the debate will be "Should federal money be used to fund research on embryonic stem cells?"

Unit 3 - Ethics - Topic 1: Embryonic Stem Cells

HERE is the link to the National Institutes of Health website that we will be using for background reading.

Here are the 2 videos we watched:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1506726820/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/stem-cells-update.html

Presentation skills

Each student will prepare a 10 minute Powerpoint presentation on the project topic. Presentations will be in class on December 10,11,13,17,18,20.

Here is the Powerpoint about presentation skills.

Plagiarism checker

HERE is the plagiarism checker we looked at in class, where you can upload your essay to check whether you have inadvertently plagiarised or forgotten to reference something. It's not foolproof but it's quite useful anyway.

Referencing & the APA style

You'll need these resources for today's class:

Paraphrasing Guide
Plagiarism Quiz
When to Cite Quiz

Here's a copy of the packet in case you lose it: Referencing and APA style packet
(HERE is the original version with more information about how to format different types of sources) .

HERE is a useful link about the APA style, including the formatting you should use for your report (line spacing, font size etc)

Fall project

You can re-download the project guidelines HERE and extra copies of the website evaluation checklist HERE.

Unit 1 - Google Search Literacy

Over the next few weeks we'll be working through Google's "search education" lessons to understand better how Google works and how to use it most effectively for research projects. Below are shortcuts to the activities we're working on in class, in case you want to go over them again at home.

Lesson 1 - Picking the right search terms

Google-a-day activity #40

Lesson 2 - Understanding search results
Google-a-day activity #47
Google-a-day activity (math)

Lesson 3 - Narrowing a search to get the best results

Lesson 4 - Evaluating credibility of sources, Worksheet - "how do I identify credible sources?"
We'll also be looking at this page [please note that one of the links is outdated - for the "authority" activity the correct link is HERE]