BIOL3700 Biology Research Project

2016

4.5

1 x 2-hour lecture per semester
1 x 4-hour seminar per semester

BIOL2701 - Experimental Design and Statistics for Biology

1 of BIOL3003, BIOL3004, BIOL3005, BIOL3363, BIOL8700, SERC3000, SERC3700 has been successfully completed

Experimental design and statistical skills such as that acquired in BIOL2701. Students without the assumed knowledge should check with the topic coordinator to ensure there background is sufficient. Those students with insufficient background may need to complete BIOL2701 before undertaking the topic.

This topic will provide students with practical experience and training in the design, execution and presentation of a research project in the field of Biological Science. Students, working either individually or in small groups will choose a research project and, in consultation with academic staff and demonstrators, formulate a key question, design experiments to address this question, carry out the experiment(s), analyse the data and prepare a written report in the form of a journal paper. The kinds of projects that are offered will depend on the individual research labs willing to host projects, and projects will have to be chosen and approved in consultation with the project host(s) and the topic coordinator prior to enrolment.

The topic will train students in research practices involving identification of important research questions, sound framing of these questions in terms that allow them to be addressed via experimentation, experimental design, execution of experiments, analysis of resulting data, and presentation of results via spoken and written reports. The topic will provide students with training that allows them to both conduct well-designed research as well as critically assess research by others. Students will also learn how to present research results in the form of seminar, poster and journal-style reports.

At the completion of the topic, students are expected to be able to:

1. Understand how to identify meaningful research questions
2. Understand how to address meaningful research questions via a series of experiments
3. Understand sound experimental design
4. Develop skills in statistical analyses of data
5. Understand and have practical experience in, how research results are presented in both spoken (seminar style) and written (journal-style papers and posters) form
6. Design, conduct and present small-scale research projects and place these into a broader context of the field that they are relevant to