Learning Goal Reflection from Second to Last Class Week.

(Learning Goals Pasted From Professor Price's Lab Notebook)

• read and write scientific papers.

During this last week we read scientific papers of our choice which we then used to create posters conveying the experimental design - use of IMRD in the papers we each chose to read.  While I was absent for this exercise I chose a paper focusing on the relationship between sexual attrativeness and earning potential for working class females, which showed a significant difference at the p=.04 level that working class females considered to be more sexually attractive by socially constructed standards earn more than working class females considered to less sexually attractive by socially constructed standards of beaty including weight, bust size, hair length, and minutes spent on beauty prepping before work.  This was a social science paper so the significance level was .10 as well.  

• examine and participate in the steps of observation-driven investigations, including crafting scientific questions and hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting and presenting results.

On Thursday we created posters that outlined proposals presenting our data in IMRD for the question of hours worked vs GPA which we looked into for the other BES 301 class.  This included interpreting and presenting results to present in a poster conveying the IMRD paper form.  I do understand why we undertook this excercise, as focusing on a topic of our choice was a question raised earlier in our class, yet to be completely honest I found this exercise to be somewhat of a distracting segway in the subject matter of this course especially as we near the end of the final paper being do.  I think some students may have felt like we were being made to esentially produce assistant rather than student work in determining to raise this issue, but to be honest I think they were just misunderstanding that the key point of this class was to learn and form a strong base in the techincal apspects of the scientific process and writing scientific papers.  Thus this information is much more straightforward and easier to learn buy taking pre-determined data and applying the scientific formats rather than having to start from scratch and building on everything from there, yet as mentioned above I think some students misinterpreted this understanding in analyzing why we worked off of the Nucella Lamellosa Data set as opposed to individually picking topics of our choice.   

• document your scientific experiences in a lab notebook.
  Doing this now, so yes.
• conduct research collaboratively, participating in peer review.

On Thurday we listened to three different presentations from our fellow students on the posters they produced for the papers they read on Tuesday, and in turn presented our posters to other students. 

• locate and review scientific literature related to a specific question.