These improvements were written after the previous class turned in the first sparrow
report. By giving you these tips up front hopefully you can avoid some common mistakes,
which will mean less editing for the final version.
HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR REPORTS
MOST IMPORTANT AREA FOR IMPROVEMENT
One of the most important determinants of your grade in future assignments is the quality
of your introduction and discussion. Methods and results are often pretty straightforward
—the biggest impact on your grade is often the quality of the introduction and
particularly the discussion. Most of you need improvement on putting
INTERPRETATION and SYNTHESIS in your discussions. I discuss this below and give
concrete examples at the very end.
PLAGIARISM: if you copy text directly from a paper, you must put it in quotation
marks to indicate this. If you do not, it is plagiarism pure and simple (i.e. without
quotation marks, you are implicitly claiming the writing is yours!). It is OK to use direct
quotes ONCE IN AWHILE, but try to avoid doing this. USE YOUR OWN WORDS.
INTRODUCTION
The introduction should present an overview of the general area of study and should NOT
start directly with specific details of your study. Make sure you give enough background
on the general topic, but don’t go overboard on too general.
For example, with the sparrows, the general topic is costs and benefits of living in
GROUPS; you do not have to consider all aspects of social evolution. That said, you
want to be more general than specifically diving in to the details of time budgets in bird
flocks in the narrow context of focusing only on Caraco’s paper. Note that the time
budget approach of Caraco is one of a few different ways to examine costs and benefits
of living in different groups. It is a fine art to find the balance between too narrow and
too specific but we will help you get there with the feedback we provide.
Also your hypotheses/predictions should not come out of thin air when you first outline
them in the introduction—EXPLAIN THE LOGIC OF YOUR HYPOTHESES, either
when you discuss your specific study, or when are discussing the area of research in
general. Finally, when we are testing the predictions of general theory—as we are in our
sparrow study— be careful to avoid claiming that we are testing the validity of the
prediction in general, or that we are verifying these predictions in general. We are not.
WE ARE SEEING IF THEY APPLY TO OUR STUDY (i.e. our study organism and the
specific time and place we do the study). Failure to find predicted patterns does not reject
anybody else’s study, or bring the entire theory into question.
METHODS
You methods were pretty good, but in some cases you provided a bit too much detail
(working in pairs, entering data in excel, etc). Avoid too much detail on stuff that is not
critical. Examples of too much detail (“we put our data in an excel spreadsheet.” or “we
worked in pairs and one person called out “now” while the other person wrote the
behavior in their notebook”). Think about the methods as a recipe, and give enough
information so that someone could repeat all of the critical details of the study, but no
more. EXAMPLE Instead of the above, you could say: “Time budget data were obtained
by observing individual sparrows for up to 5 cumulative minutes of observation and
noting which of three behaviors the individual was performing at ten second intervals:
aggression, feeding, or scanning. A bird was considered feeding if it was pecking at the
ground; it was considered engaged in aggression if involved in chases or physical fights;
a bird was scanning if it was sitting still searching. In some cases it was unclear whether
the bird was scanning or feeding, and we classified these instances as a fourth category,
“feed-scanning”. To determine whether this ambiguous category was more likely to be
scanning or feeding, we conducted two separate time budget analyses where feed-scans
were considered feeds and where they were considered scans.”
NOTE: for studies where we are doing counts of specific behaviors or doing time budget
type work on behaviors, make sure you describe the different behaviors as I have done
above. For example, what specifically did you include as feeding in the sparrows? What
did you consider as aggression? What was scanning?
Finally, it is typical to outline at the bottom of the methods what statistical tests you use
and the statistical program. Example: “Spearman rank correlations were used in the
program JMP to examine the relation between group size and the proportion individual’s
time budget spent in foraging, scanning or aggressive interactions.”
RESULTS
1) IF P > 0.05 there is no pattern; do not say there was sort of a pattern. Example: Group
size and proportion of time were not correlated (rho =XX, P > 0.1). THIS IS
CRITICAL—you need to think back to the stats lecture and the whole point of statistics.
2) Organize results in clear organized manner that is logical. Example, in the sparrow lab
you could have two subsections, each dealing with results where the feed-scan variable is
treated differently (e.g. results with feed scans treated as scans, then results with feed
scans treated as feed)
3) We are not supposed to do any MAJOR interpreting in the methods section but instead
just report the patterns.
DISCUSSION
Don’t state that our hypotheses were supported or not, or imply whether the study got it
right or not. Just say what we found and then interpret what our findings mean.
Don’t just reiterate the patterns you describe in the results: INTERPRET them! It is OK
to have a one or two sentence summary of the main findings at the beginning of the
discussion, but a whole paragraph that simply repeats what was covered in the results is a
big fat waste of time. Assume your reader is smart enough to remember what you just
told them about in the results!
INTERPRET your results within the context of your own study, and also in the
context of the general literature. To help you understand what I mean, below I give
concrete examples of what would be suitable topics for interpretation and synthesis.
Finally, with respect to interpreting your findings in light of the results of other studies,
don’t just provide a list of a bunch of other studies that found the same thing!
INTERPRET THINGS!
Finally, many of you presented background logic to Caraco’s ideas in the discussion—
this is not interpretation, it is background and background belongs in the introduction. Of
course it is OK to bring up assumptions of the predictions you tested if you are then
going to discuss these assumptions in more detail. In this case, pointing out the
assumptions is just the beginning point of what you discuss and is not the entirety of what
you discuss.
CONCRETE EXAMPLE OF INTERPRETATION (Just some suggestions to give those
of you who had difficulties some ideas; you don’t have to use all of these. And find
references that motivate these questions, don’t just throw them out there)
1) Why might there be no correlation between group size and aggression? Two possible
reasons include (i) aggression is common but does not vary with group size and (ii)
aggression was actually quite rare in our study. Why don’t you look at the average values
for the different categories and see how common the different behaviors—this could be
informative.
2) If big groups are so useful, why aren’t groups always at the optimal size?
3) How might variation in temperature affect things? Might aggression be more important
when conditions are harsher (and food more worth fighting for?)
4) Why might there be a trade-off between scanning and feeding? (Hint: when not
feeding, what else are these birds doing and what does that tell us about what is important
to them?)
5) How might variation in social dominance be factored in? We averaged across all
individuals but it might be interesting to think about whether dominant and subordinate
individuals gain the same benefits from being in different sized groups and therefore
whether larger groups have a different composition with respect to dominant and
subordinate individuals than small groups.