Methods Project Abstract

In Spring 2018, as part of the Biology Writing Course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst an experiment was conducted. This experiment focused on developing and following a methods section of an experiment report. In this experiment, students were tasked with creating a multi-panel figure consisting of three pictures, one picture of the entire plant, a close-up of the flower, and a map of the origin of the species. After the multi-panel figure was created, students wrote a methods section that described how the multi-panel figure was created. From there another student would follow the procedure and post a replicate multi-panel figure. I observed that the two different figures that were created were not formatted in the same way and the subject of interest in the pictures was not consistent.These differences suggest that the methods section did not specify the formatting of the multi-panel figure or the specific plant to take a picture of.