The Scientific Method of

Investigation and Reporting

Compiled by: Hossein Davarinejad
The scientific method of investigation equips you with proper steps for understanding phenomena and
finding answers to your questions regarding it. The way we report our findings allows others to understand
and learn from our work.
Here you will first learn how to investigate, then how to report it (like your lab report). Your McMillan
book has much greater and complete details on the information here, hence being a part of required text
for the course. Use this guide for doing your reports. If the lab manual clearly dictates the way you should
do something which is not in agreement with the information here, you must follow the lab manual rules.
The breakdown and the expected work is outlined at the end of each lab module in the lab manual.
Investigation
Observation
The scientific method starts with observation of a phenomena. For example you notice something is
occurring differently than usual in different conditions; or you notice patterns in the occurrence of some
event.
Example: The plants you have growing in your backyard are much taller than the ones growing in your
front porch.
Literature Research and Questioning
Once you have made an observation, you need to come up with some questions. But you cant just ask
any unrelated question. For example Hmmm Is the position of my laptop on my desk affecting the
growth of the front porch plants?. It is important to do some background research first and find out what
kind of things generally affect plant growth. Then you will come up with more legitimate questions.
Example: Is sunlight affecting the growth of my plants? Is the soil affecting it? Is it because we sprayed the
front porch plants with pesticides? Is it because the dog pees in the front yard?
Developing a Hypothesis
At this point you will narrow down your questions and aim to investigate a particular effect on the subject
of your observation. You now arent concerned with the general word affects or changes. Instead you
are looking at a specific way of affecting or changing from one of those questions at a time (one
hypothesis at a time). You will propose this in the form of a specific statement (a hypothesis).
In a hypothesis, you state very specifically the way A affects B. Therefor because B is expected to
change with response to A it is termed the dependant variable. And because A is the agent of change
to which the independent variable responds to, it is termed the independent variable.
The form of a hypothesis in which you claim no effect from the independent variable to the dependant,
is called the null hypothesis or Ho. The alternative form in which you state a specific effect, is called
the alternative hypothesis or HA.
Now lets take one of our questions and form a hypothesis
Example: Ho: Pesticides have no effect on plant growth.
HA: Pesticides reduce the growth of plants.
Pay attention that we no longer just say effect. We mentioned specifically that we are looking at growth.
Dependant variable: plant growth
Independent variable: pesticides
Because in our HA we are expecting the plant growth to depend on and respond to pesticides.
Experimental Design
Once we have identified what exactly we want to investigate by forming a hypothesis, we need to see if
we can come up with a way to test this. Sometimes we cannot measure the quantity or the quality in
question. If testable, the design of an experiment could be subject to a great deal of flaws, so it is very
important to consider many aspects of the experiment.
Treatments: The treatments are the applications of the independent variable (pesticides). An experiment
may have one or many treatments.
Example: You could setup 4 dose dependant treatments (spray pesticide on plant for 1, 5, 10 or 20
seconds), 2 different kind of pesticide chemicals, 3 different ways of applying it to the plant (spray on the
leaf, on the stem, on top of the roots). So this setup will involve 9 treatments.
Controls: every experiment needs one or more controls. A control is a sample or subject that you do NOT
apply the treatment or independent variable (pesticide) to.
Example: Your control would be not treating a plant with any pesticide.
Constants: Constants are all the factors that you can think of which can affect your dependant variable
(plant growth). Constants need to carefully be identified and kept exactly the same for all treatment so
that you could see the effect of your independent variable (pesticide) in isolation. This is because if there
are more than one thing present which can have an effect on your plant growth, you wont know whether
the effect is from one or the other.
Replicates (Trials): Replicates are the number of time you repeat the experimental conditions.
Example: You could only do each of the 9 treatments once or ten times. There more times the better (we
will discuss why this is important later in the results).
For example: If you do not water these plants exactly the same way, you cant really know if some of them
grew smaller because of the lack of water or because they were sprayed with pesticide. Other constants
which have to be kept identical for this experiment include: the amount of sunlight the plant are receiving,
their exposure to open air, fertilizer if any used and many more. You may even have to start growing these
plants from seed just to be extra sure that everything was kept constant and the same before you applied
the pesticide.

After all of the treatments, controls and constants are characterized, you can prepare the conditions and
carry out your tests.
Results and Statistical Analysis
Your results are collected as you go along your experiment and record all the data which you are
measuring. Raw data needs to be analyzed and organized to be comparable.
Statistics is a very important tool in Biology (and other sciences). The more data you collect (the more
replicates or trials you have), the more room for statistical analysis. Stats give meaning to your findings
from your results.
For example: If you tested your hypothesis by spraying pesticide on only 1 plant and found that the plant
grew smaller compared to your control (no pesticide), you could say that the hypothesis is confirmed. But
how confident would you be in making this statement? What if you sprayed 20 different plants and
realized only one of them grew smaller? Wouldnt that make your claim a very weak and unreliable one?
It sure would. The more you try this experiment and the more replicates you have for it can majorly
increase the confidence in your claim and make a statement based on the average (mean) of your many
results.
There are some mathematics also involved in statistical analysis. For example, you could calculate the
amount of error you may have had in measuring your data. The amount of error increases as your data
are more different from each other. For example, if you sprayed pesticides 20 times and found that most
of the plants grew about 20-25 cm taller than the control, the window of error will be small. But if your
measurements showed that they are very much scattered between 0-25 cm, it would mean that the
results vary by much difference and the error windows is large.
The larger the error window the less significant your finding becomes. More information on this later in
this document.

Reporting

Once you have ran your experiments and analyzed your data, it is time to make a report so that other
scientists or ordinary people can read and learn about your work. Therefore, the effort you put into writing
the report should be high.
Introduction
The intro is where you inform your reader about your investigation and provide background knowledge.
Start wide and general. Tell your reader some general information about the context of what the work is
about. For example, for our pesticide effects on plants height experiment, you would start by talking about
how species respond to environmental stimuli. Then at a later step you have to narrow down to the factors
that can influence plants. You can talk about what aspects of plants respond to the environment (e.g.
colour, leaf size, shape). Then bring the focus to the height (dependant variable) and explain the kind of
stimuli you or other researchers have identified to affect plant growth (height). By this stage you are
narrowing things down to exactly what you were looking at so it is only appropriate for you to say why
you think this is important to look at. Now you can state your hypothesis (HA).
Write the introduction like a story. Make it sound interesting. Be careful with your grammar and
punctuation. Use full sentences that are not too long. Long sentences are hard to follow.

Materials & Methods
After you have introduced the work, in this section you need to describe all the steps that you have taken
to perform the experiments. Everything you used, all the timings, the way you performed it all need to be
there in good detail. Someone reading this should be able to do exactly what you did. If the experiment is
brand new and you came up with it, then you are not referring to anything. But this is not your case. Your
lab experiments are either directly from the lab manual or adapted from it. You can say that the
experiment is adapted from York Universitys BIOL 1000 Course Laboratory Manual and cite it (both in-
text and in full in the reference section). In general any changes to an adapted method should be
mentioned.

Results
This is where you show your collected data. How you show your data is a very big deal! The results section
can have tables, figures, illustrations and images, in addition to a text portion which describes them. Be
very careful to only describe them and NOT analyze them. Dont talk about what the data means here,
that is for the discussion part. Every table, figure and others must have a number, a meaningful and
descriptive title. These are numbered independently of each other. That means if you had a Table 1 first
before your figure, you wont label it as Figure 2 ;because its the first Figure, therefore, it must be
Figure 1. When describing any of these (figures, tables) in the text portion of the results, you must
refer to them by type and number.
For example:
The height differentials for measured for the experimental conditions are shown in Figure 1.
This was a direct reference to Figure 1. Sometimes, you can indirectly refer to them, for example:
To investigate the growth differences between the experimental plants, we measure their heights (Table
1).
Whatever way you do it, there references must be valid and referring to the correct data.
A very nice way to open your results text is to reiterate in a (super short form) the experiment and the
purpose. To get a better idea, imagine that someone read your introduction, but skipped your materials
and methods. You open by saying what is it that you wanted to do and what experiment you did to do it.
Be careful with this. You dont want to go over 2-3 short sentences for this.
In scientific publications, raw data is not shown. In your 3
rd
and 4
th
year undergrad biology courses you
may be able to dispense it and only show graphical representation of the data instead of tables showing
measured values for each condition and trial. For the purpose of this course (BIOL 1000), however you
need to show me your raw data as well, and you will have a Table for it.

For example:
Table 1: Height of plants grown with or without
pesticides.
Treatments

Plant height
No pesticide(Control)
(cm)
Plant height
With pesticide
(cm)
Trial 1 10.5 3.0
Trial 2 12 3.1
Trial 3 11 2.8


You may decide to show your table in this way orientation:
Table 1: Height of plants grown with or without
pesticides.
Treatments Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 3
No pesticide (Control) (cm) 10.5 12 11
With pesticide (cm) 3.0 3.1 2.8

You will decide which way is better shown, or looks nicer. If you are calculating other things such as
averages (mean) or the Standard Error of the Mean (SEM) based on these values, you can just attach it as
another column or row to the existing table. This way you avoid unnecessary Tables. For example:
Table 1: Height of plants grown with or without pesticides.
Treatments Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 3 Mean SEM
No pesticide (Control) (cm) 10.5 12 11 11.17 0.49
With pesticide (cm) 3.0 3.1 2.8 2.97 0.09

Pay attention that the label or the title of a Table goes on the top of the table as shown in the above
tables.
For the purpose of BIOL 1000, you will need to show a sample for any mathematical calculations (only for
one set of the data). The sample calculation will be displayed in an appendix. You can either say in the
body of the text that you are providing a sample calculation for that value in the appendix or hint at it in
the table itself such as the following:
Table 1: Height of plants grown with or without pesticides.
Treatments Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 3 Mean SEM
No pesticide (Control) (cm) 10.5 12 11 11.17* 0.49*
With pesticide (cm) 3.0 3.1 2.8 2.97 0.09
*: Sample calculations are provided in Appendix A.

Notice the asterisk (*) for the mean and the SEM of the No pesticide data set and at the bottom of the
table.
Now it is time to show a graphical representation of these data. Charts or graphs make an excellent
representation. There are line graphs, scatter plots, bar graphs, pie charts and many other. Your data can
technically be displayed in any of these forms, but your choice should be smart! Each of these kinds of
graphs are good for a certain kind of presentation. For example if you need to show the percentages of
the constituents of something you would go with a pie chart:


Figure 1 The assignment of the monthly budget from my
student loan.

Line graphs are best for showing continuous data such as how a value changes with responds to gradual
changes of the stimulus.
10%
20%
40%
30%
Monthly Budget
Transportation Food Rent Entertainment

Figure 2 Temperature changes during one hour after
turning the heater on.
If data is comparing the average of many trials and replicates, a bar graph would seem most appropriate.
If you are comparing more than one dependant variable (e.g height and leaf area), you can group the bars
together for each condition.

Figure 3 Height and Leaf Area Differential for experimental conditions. The
leaf areas values are in cm
2
and the height values are represented in cm.

The error bars on the coloured bars are the SEMs. These show the range of error for the measured
values. The smaller they are they the better, because its shows consistency and accuracy of our data.
This is why statistics is so important. Consider the following Figure (Figure 4):
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
T
e
m
p
e
r
a
t
i
u
r
e

(
C
e
l
s
i
u
s
)
Time (Minutes)
Changes of Temperaure During 1 hour
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
No Pesticide (Control) With Pesicide
Height Leaf Area

Figure 4 Height and Leaf Area Differential for experimental conditions. The
leaf areas values are in cm
2
and the height values are represented in cm.
Looking at the blue bars (height differentials) with such large error bars, you will realize that the data is
not very significant. This is because not only the error bars come close together, they overlap (the region
between 4-5). The error bar shows that the average values we had collected in Table 1 could actually vary
within the length of the error bar. That means the average which you reported to be 11.7 for the control
could be as low as 4 due to error! And if the pesticide treatment could go as high as 4 (also due to error)
then you really cant claim that there is real difference between the two conditions. Again this is how
important statistics are, and the larger the sample size (number of replicates or trials for each condition)
the more accurate the error bars, and the smaller and further away the error bars are from each other,
the more significant the findings of your results.
Pay attention that the labels and titles for all figures are displayed at the bottom as shown for the above
figures.

Discussion
The discussion is where you show your understanding of the whole work. Its where you analyze and talk
about the trends and the significance of your data. Also a place for conclusions, suggestions and being
critical. In your conclusion you have to address if your hypothesis is confirmed or rejected. If things are
opposite of what was expected talk about why you think that is? What could have been done differently?
What were the flaws in your experiment? Did anybody else do the same experiment and find similar or
different results? Make references to other works done by other in the context of your study and cite
them.


0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
No Pesticide (Control) With Pesicide
Height Leaf Area
References
A list of full citations from all the references you have made during the entire report. Every in-text citation
must be listed fully here and everything here must have been referred to in the report. Leave no reference
orphaned.
Make sure you follow the CSE style as explained in McMillan and practised in the first lab session.
Alphabetize the list. This is done to ease finding references while reading the report. For example if in the
introduction you cited (Davarinejad 2013), your reader may want to immediately have a look at that
source. So, they will flip to your reference section (list) and try to find Davarinejad. Imagine if you had
50 references that were not in alphabetic order. You would have to go through them on by one to find it.
But had it been in alphabetic order, you could quickly find D and then Davarinejad.

Appendix
The appendix is really there to hide things or information that is not necessary in the body of the text and
could be distracting. If there are different kind of things to hide here, you should have multiple
appendices. If you only are showing the same kind but from different parts of the report, you could just
use one Appendix. For example if you are only dumping calculations in here, they can all go under one
Appendix. But if you have calculations, manufacturers information of some of your materials used, extra
images and such, you could put them in different appendices (Appendix A, Appendix B).
For the appendix with the calculations, refer back to what calculation you are expanding. If there are
multiple ones, label each. For example:
Sample calculation for the SEM (Table 1):
Use Microsoft Word to type the equations in. Go under the Insert tab on the top, then click on
equations (NOT the arrow next to it, but itself). The menu will change to show you all sorts of symbols,
and equation types such as fractions and square roots.