Long Term Project Analysis

Biology

Now that you have created tables and graphs that you can use to quickly visualize the date you collected during your long-term project, you can use your data to try to answer the question you were asking. In one to two sentences for each, respond to the following prompts (example responses are provided for clarity). When you are done with this assignment, make sure you save it to your H: drive as a Microsoft Word 2003 document. (Please ask if you need help with this.) You do not need to turn in this assignment today, but you will need to access it later this week.

1. What was the question you were asking in your project?

The question we asked was “How does wind affect the number of spines on a cactus?”.

2. In looking at your data, what appears to be the answer to your question? How does your data show you that this is the answer?

The answer to our question is that greater amounts of wind resulted in more spines on our cacti. At low wind levels (0.1 m/s), the cacti had an average of 3.4 spines per square cm. At higher wind levels (1 m/s), the cacti had an average of 5.2 spines per square cm.

3. Describe what your data might have looked like if the answer to your question would have been different.

If the answer to our question had been different, we would not have seen an increase in the number of spines per square cm as the amount of wind increased.

4. Do you think that the results of your experiment can be generalized – in other words, do you think that if another group of researchers asked the same question, they would get the same answer?

I think that our results were only accurate for our study. Although we saw an increase in the average number of spines on the cacti, there was a lot of variety in the number of spines we measured in all the wind conditions – so the answer we got might have just been a coincidence.

5. What changes could you have made in your methods (either your project set-up or your data collection) to make your data more meaningful?

I think our data would have been better if we had used more cacti. Also, when we made our measurements, all of the cacti were pretty close together – it would have been useful to use a wind tunnel to make sure that only one cactus at a time was affected by the winds we were generating.