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Presenting your data in the correct way is vital for all years. I will add
more here when I have the time.
In science we present our data or results in many ways.
Rather than write many sentences which readers need to search through the idea
is that the results (data) can be easily seen and we start usually by presenting
them in a table.
Things to remember when making a table:-
- make a title that tells you everything you need to
know about the experiment. A good title would be "Monitoring changes
in heartbeat by measuring pulse rate at varying stages of exercise"
and a bad one would be "Pulse rates"
- make sure that you put in all the information you
want the reader to see - and don't fill in the table with lots of stuff that
they don't need in order to understand what you found out
- make sure that all columns in the table have
descriptive headings
- keep all decimals the same i.e. don't put 21 and
43.889 in the same column! Decide how many decimal places you want and stick
to it with all data - using zero's for whole numbers
- Don't forget to include units (cm, oC,
seconds)
- Try and arrange the data in a sensible order and not
jumbled up
To make our results more easy to understand and to show
any patterns and trends in them we use a chart or graph. These are very
important and easy to interpret. Here are some of the types you will need to be
able to plot:-
Line Graph
- decide which of your results you want to show in a
graph - what have you discovered?
- make a title that tells
you everything you need to know about the experiment. A good title would be
"Monitoring changes in heartbeat by measuring pulse rate at varying
stages of exercise" and a bad one would be "Pulse rates"
Just the same as the table!
- the measurement you chose to make is the one that
goes on the x (horizontal) axis and the one that was dependant on
that is plotted on the y (vertical) axis. If you chose to measure the
temperature of water heating up every minute then you would plot time
on the x axis and temperature on the y axis. The temperature
of the water depends on when you measure it!
- decide on a sensible scale - don't start scale at
zero if data is between 300 and 320 or there will be a lot of waste space
- make sure you have made an even scale - this means
equal numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10, 20, 30. 40 or 50, 100, 150. Student
sometimes just plot the readings they have like 2, 7, 29, 55, 56 and this is
wrong. An even scale is needed to show results properly
- both axis should be labeled with name and don't
forget to put in the units too
- Finally plot your points with little x's on
the graph paper and then add a 'line of best fit' where trends and
patterns can be shown
More graphs to
follow........................................
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