discussion science report

Your discussion section has two fundamental aims:  to explain the results of your study,  to explore the significance of your study’s findings. Therefore you need to:  interpret and explain your results;  examine whether and how the questions raised in the introduction section have been answered;  show how your results relate to the literature;   qualify and explore the theoretical importance/significance of your results;  outline any new research questions or areas for future research that your results have suggested. The discussion is also the place in a report where any qualifications or reservations you have about the research should be aired. Statistically significant results still require analysis and discussion. You might consider questions like the ones below.  How generally do your results apply?  How close to real life are the variables you manipulated in a laboratory situation?  Were their any defects in your experimental design or procedure?  Were their any confounding factors in your design: could some other factor explain your results? These are the types of questions you will need to consider in terms of your results in terms of defining the generality and limitations of your results. The discussion section requires you to use both the past tense and the present tense. The past tense is used when you need to explain particulars about your results; for example,  This group achieved this level of performance after less time studying the instructions,  The activity of the enzyme increased with temperatures up to 37°C. The present tense is used when you are expanding on the implications of your results or drawing conclusions; for example,   The results show the effectiveness of combination drug therapy as a treatment.   This research provides powerful evidence that. Separating the Results and Discussion sections is one way of organising this.
The Writer's Handbook Writing Scientific Reports This section describes an organizational structure commonly used to report experimental research in many scientific disciplines, the IMRAD format: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion. Although the main headings are standard for many scientific fields, details may vary; check with your instructor, or, if submitting an article to a journal, refer to the instructions to authors. Use the menu below to find out how to write each part of a scientific report. The table below offers some questions effective discussion sections in scientific reports address. What do your observations mean? Summarize the most important findings at the beginning. What conclusions can you draw? For each major result: Describe the patterns, principles, relationships your results show. Explain how your results relate to expectations and to literature cited in your Introduction. Do they agree, contradict, or are they exceptions to the rule? Explain plausibly any agreements, contradictions, or exceptions. Describe what additional research might resolve contradictions or explain exceptions. How do your results fit into a broader context? Suggest the theoretical implications of your results. Suggest practical applications of your results? Extend your findings to other situations or other species. Give the big picture: do your findings help us understand a broader topic? Additional tips: Move from specific to general: your finding(s) --> literature, theory, practice. Don't ignore or bury the major issue. Did the study achieve the goal (resolve the problem, answer the question, support the hypothesis) presented in the Introduction? Make explanations complete. Give evidence for each conclusion. Discuss possible reasons for expected and unexpected findings. What to avoid: Don't overgeneralize. Don't ignore deviations in your data. Avoid.
Writing a discussion section is where you really begin to add your interpretations to the work. In this critical part of the research paper, you start the process of explaining any links and correlations apparent in your data. If you left few interesting leads and open questions in the results section, the discussion is simply a matter of building upon those and expanding them. The Difficulties of Writing a Discussion Section In an ideal world, you could simply reject your null or alternative hypotheses according to the significance levels found by the statistics. That is the main point of your discussion section, but the process is usually a lot more complex than that. It is rarely clear-cut, and you will need to interpret your findings. For example, one of your graphs may show a distinct trend, but not enough to reach an acceptable significance level. Remember that no significance is not the same as no difference, and you can begin to explain this in your discussion section. Whilst your results may not be enough to reject the null hypothesis, they may show a trend that later researchers may wish to explore, perhaps by refining the experiment. Self-Criticism at the Heart of Writing a Discussion Section For this purpose, you should criticize the experiment, and be honest about whether your design was good enough. If not, suggest any modifications and improvements that could be made to the design. Maybe the reason that you did not find a significant correlation is because your sampling was not random, or you did not use sensitive enough equipment. The discussion section is not always about what you found, but what you did not find, and how you deal with that. Stating that the results are inconclusive is the easy way out, and you must always try to pick out something of value. Using the Discussion Section to Expand Knowledge You should always put your findings into the.
Note that sometimes in lab reports it may be more appropriate to present the results in one section, called Results, and then to discuss them in a separate Discussion section. In the Results and Discussion section, you present your results and discuss them by: commenting on the results obtained interpreting what the results mean and explaining any results which are unexpected. You present the measurements made in the experiment and you then compare your measurements to the calculations you made in your preliminary work or the published theoretical values. You need to: identify any discrepancies and to state them as a percentage. You also need to: identify any sources of error in your measurements and if possible, suggest how your experiment could have been performed more accurately. What should you aim for? Clear comparisons made between the calculations and the measurements with the discrepancy expressed as a percentage. Good explanation of the possible reasons for the discrepancy and the possible sources of error in the measurements. Example Here are some useful expressions to use if your measurements correspond well with your calculations: The measurements are consistent with the preliminary calculations. The measured values agree well with the calculated values. Example Here are some useful expressions if your measurements do not correspond well with your calculations: The measurements are significantly different from the preliminary calculations. The measured values do not agree well with the calculated values. Example Here are some useful expressions for explaining the source of errors: The discrepancy may be due to human error. The difference may be the result of incorrect calibrations.
The discussion can seem very difficult to write at first, but I figured that like almost everything in life, the key is to divide the process step-by-step and to prepare a detailed plan of the overall section. Once you have dissected it into 5 or 6 paragraphs, you’ll see that filling each one of them is actually quite easy. Here is an example you can use to write your own discussion. In the first paragraph, summarize what was the goal of the study and what you did. You should do it in one or two phrases maximum. For example: “In an effort to elucidate the identity of the genetic factors implicated in stroke, we performed a case-control study and genotyped 200 SNPs in 1000 cases and 1000 controls of stroke.” Then explain your findings one by one (there shouldn’t be more than 3 to 4 key findings). For each one, summarize what was found and explain how it confirms or refutes what’s described in the literature. If there are methodological differences with other articles or limitations in your study, you can explain them here. Now focus on your main outcome. Start with the smaller degree of importance you can imagine and explain what you results can mean. For example, if you discovered a new mutation associated with myocardial infarction, you can describe here the mutation, what it does, where it’s located, if it’s associated with functional properties of the resulting protein, what’s its frequency in the population, what’s its effect on the disease, etc. Make sure to reference each statement to the proper published article. Following the same example as above, you can now enlarge a bit the field by explaining for example in which gene is the mutation located, what is known about the gene, which diseases it’s been related to, etc. Try to relate information that is especially relevant to your study. For instance, if you are studying a certain kind of cancer, it might be.
| Table of Contents | FAQs | PDF Version | Why a Scientific Format? The scientific format may seem confusing for the beginning science writer due to its rigid structure which is so different from writing in the humanities. One reason for using this format is that it is a means of efficiently communicating scientific findings to the broad community of scientists in a uniform manner. Another reason, perhaps more important than the first, is that this format allows the paper to be read at several different levels. For example, many people skim Titles to find out what information is available on a subject. Others may read only titles and Abstracts. Those wanting to go deeper may look at the Tables and Figures in the Results, and so on. The take home point here is that the scientific format helps to insure that at whatever level a person reads your paper (beyond title skimming), they will likely get the key results and conclusions. Top of page The Sections of the Paper Most journal-style scientific papers are subdivided into the following sections: Title, Authors and Affiliation, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgments, and Literature Cited, which parallel the experimental process. This is the system we will use. This website describes the style, content, and format associated with each section. The sections appear in a journal style paper in the following prescribed order: Section Headings: Main Section Headings: Each main section of the paper begins with a heading which should be capitalized, centered at the beginning of the section, and double spaced from the lines above and below. Do not underline the section heading OR put a colon at the end. Example of a main section heading: INTRODUCTION Subheadings: When your paper reports on more than one experiment, use subheadings to help organize the presentation. Subheadings should be capitalized.