Squirrel Lab Report – Are all sounds worth worrying about?

Assignment:

Write a lab report in the format of a scientific paper investigating the differences between the Continuous sampling method and the Periodic sampling method for constructing time budgets for understanding animal behavior.

Due Date:

October 23 by 5PM. Use Turnitin via Moodle.

Format:

The format will be similar to that used in the papers you have read for Biology 261 from Animal Behavior and Behavioral Ecology. Specifically, you can read about how I expect you to write a scientific paper by logging into the Biology 261 website and clicking on Ethogram Instructions. Then, click on the link to "Formal Write-up". There you will see a link to "Writing Scientific Papers". This link gives you a detailed explanation of each section of a scientific paper, as well as helpful hints on how to construct each section.

Details of the assignment:

You will be expected to have EVERY section outlined in the "Writing Scientific Papers" web page. However, this is not a full-blown scientific paper you are writing, so you won't provide the same amount of information for each section as you would in that case. Below, I list what is expected of you for each section of this lab report with respect to what is outlined in the links above:

1. Title page: same as on web
2. Abstract: same as so web
3. Introduction: I DO NOT expect you to do a full-blown literature search for this lab report. I would like you to find 2-3 papers that give you perspective on this work and integrate those into your intro/discussion section. Thus, your intro will be rather short; it should introduce the question, hypothesis and predictions and only needs include minor use of the primary literature to support the ideas.
4. Methods:as we discussed in class. You need to be sure that you carefully document all your work so that another research could successfully replicate your study. Note: you used Ethoscribe (from Tima Scientific) on the Newton handheld computer.
5. Results: as we discuss in class. This will be essentially what has been assigned for your lab notebook, in final, presentation form. If you do more than was required for your notebook, include that.
6. Discussion: similar to what is on the web, but, again, you do NOT need to put this into a larger context, i.e., you are not required to cite more than 2-3 scientific papers. However, I expect you to think about your results and your experiment. You should talk specifically about your results and what they tell you.
7. Literature cited: very short.
8. Tables and Figures: as on web.

Overall, I don't want you to "pad" your report to reach some pre-designated length. I would expect your Introduction to be no more than a page. The methods will probably be about a page (they must include how you prepared the data, etc.) and the results much less (not counting any figures you might want to include). The discussion should be one or two pages. Thus, not counting the abstract and title pages, your lab report will be 3-4 pages. At the same time, I will not be grading based on length of manuscript, but in how well you present the necessary and relevant information and ideas, particularly with regard to your evaluation of the two methods.