Ask an Expert: Control Groups>>>Graphs and Photographs?

Greetings!
Regarding culture dish photos and the science display board, is it necessary to include photo examples of a positive control dish and a negative control dish, in addition to an example of each experimental dish? (Is one example enough for each trial or should you show all three, resulting in smaller images?) Also, do you need to graph the positive and negative controls? If so, should the graph be separate? I guess what I'm trying to ask is if the controls need to be included on the board or does it take away from the experimental group results? Thanx. Happy New Year!

Chili wrote:Greetings!
Regarding culture dish photos and the science display board, is it necessary to include photo examples of a positive control dish and a negative control dish, in addition to an example of each experimental dish? (Is one example enough for each trial or should you show all three, resulting in smaller images?) Also, do you need to graph the positive and negative controls? If so, should the graph be separate? I guess what I'm trying to ask is if the controls need to be included on the board or does it take away from the experimental group results? Thanx. Happy New Year!

I think controls should go on the board. Without knowing the results of the control experiments, you cannot evaluate if the experimental results are valid. As for including all trials vs. one trial, I think that is up to you. Just be careful and choose representative pictures vs. the best pictures if you only decide to show one. You could also include one big picture, and then have the other trials smaller as an inset.


Louise

Thanks for past info. Are captions with some amount of repeated info )already stated in results) supposed to be written under the test group examples or should they just be simply identified? If there is to be a small amount of writing, should it be in sentence form or can it be in bullet form? Finally, if one writes under each test group, should they be decribing just that one dish shown or the test group as a whole? Thanks very much!

Chili wrote:Thanks for past info. Are captions with some amount of repeated info )already stated in results) supposed to be written under the test group examples or should they just be simply identified? If there is to be a small amount of writing, should it be in sentence form or can it be in bullet form? Finally, if one writes under each test group, should they be decribing just that one dish shown or the test group as a whole? Thanks very much!

FIgures and captions are supposed to explain the project in a quick and easy to understand way. Other than that, there aren't strict guidelines. Obviously, having a paragraph long figure caption in tiny type doesn't help this goal, so usually bullet type descriptions are used.

As for if each dish should be labeled or just the group, that is a judgement call. Which method would make the results more clear? If all the dishes in a group are pretty similar, a group caption is probably fine. If you want to point out something specific about one dsh in a group, that is also fine.

Louise