A study about dementia
Write the materials and methods section AND the results section of your paper. These sections work hand-in-hand. In materials and methods, you explain in detail what you used to conduct your study (materials) and how you conducted your study (methods). In results, you present the data that you collected by conducting your study. Usually, this takes the form of graphs and/or tables. Further instructions below: Materials and Methods A materials and methods section is like a recipe – every detail must be included and made very explicit so that someone else can replicate it exactly as you did it. The materials are your “ingredients,” and the methods are the “cooking instructions.” First, lay out the materials you used in your study. Depending on your study, these may include equipment, animals, surveys, human participants, etc. Be detailed. If you used rats, what kind of rats? If you used people, what age range? How many were men? How many women? Do they need to be from a similar socio-economic status for your results to be accurate? If so, why? Etc., etc. etc. Next, provide a step-by-step account of the techniques used to collect your data. Again, be detailed. If you’re trying to determine whether one group had more likelihood of tumor development than another, how are you testing for tumors? Are you counting number of tumors or measuring size of tumors or both? What unit of measurement are you using? Are you including both benign and malignant tumors or only malignant? Don’t leave any gaps in explaining your process/techniques. Materials and methods should be written in the past tense because you’re pretending you already conducted the study. Use of first person is okay here (but not on the rest of the paper). Do not use separate subtitles for materials and methods. Just develop fluid paragraphs as you would in a regular paper. Length requirement – 2 to 4 pages Results You will actually want to decide what you intend to show in your results before you work through your materials and methods. You have to first ask yourself, “What am I trying to prove?” before you can work out, “Here’s how I’m going to go about proving it.” You will need at least two graphs for your results, which means that you need at least two dependent variables. For each graph, write a detailed description of what the graph shows. Do not interpret the data yet; that’s what your conclusion is for. Simply explain in black and white what the graphs are showing.
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