Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

First of all I would like to thank everyone who helped me in my project. I really appreciate it A LOT. I have a final request. My project was selected to go to the regionals by my school and to register to the regionals I'm asked to give a summary of my project. This summary should not exceed 250 words and it counts in the judging process. I have written my summary and the only thing I want you to do is read it and tell if I should make any changes. This is my summary:

Over hundreds of years people have attempted to measure intelligence and much of the time the effects have been more harmful than helpful to those being assessed. For example, people with lower scores were often excluded from positions of employment or ridiculed by others. With this in mind I determined a project that wouldn’t harm the participants and at the same time the participants would have an opportunity to benefit from the research. I developed a question about studying skills and whether Mnemonics (memory strategies) are to any use to students. The purpose of my project was to find out whether the use of mnemonics for encoding information is useful in retrieving the information during a test.

To test my experiment I used 50 subjects, of the same age and divided them into control and experimental groups. The control group was given an article to study and was then tested the following day. The experimental group was given the same article but was also provided with a mnemonic technique to help them with memorizing the information. The experimental group was also given the same time to study. When the tests were given and then marked, the results showed that the group that studied without the mnemonic technique scored higher than those who did study with the mnemonic technique. In conclusion, I should say that my hypothesis should be rejected. But there are many different factors that should be given some thought before saying mnemonics are not useful.

Thank a lot

Congratulations on getting to the regionals!

I have read your summary and have a few comments. Fist of all I like the way that you have the frist paragraph about your background reasoning for doing the experiment and general aim and then proceed to tell us what you did in the second paragraph and what the results were - great!

I noticed a couple of grammatical/typing errors and some small omissions:
paragraph 1, line 3 perhaps designed a project would be better than determined a project?
paragraph 1, line5-6 "whether Mnemonics (memory strategies) are to any use to students" should be "whether Mnemonics (memory strategies) are of use to students", or "whether Mnemonics (memory strategies) are useful to students"
paragraph 2, line 1 - "divided them into control and experimental groups" perhaps add the words randomly and equal sized if that applies: divided them randomly into equal sized control and experimental groups.
paragraph 2, line 6 remove the period before But and replace with comma.

Best of luck
Caroline

Thank you for very much , Caroline!!!

Very nice work. I like the overall structure. I have one suggestion. The transition from intelligence tests to your own work seemed like a leap, because, if I understand correctly, your experimental procudure is a possible learning aid, and it is not an alternative to an intelligence test. I would suggest that you focus on (or at least include) the history of mnemonics and memory training in those first two sentences as opposed to the problems with IQ testing.


Congratulations!

Thank you, Chris. I have already registered for the science fair online when I read your reply. Do you think I should email them and ask them if i could sign in again and then I could fix me science project summary? I wrote about intellegence in the beginning of my summary because my original project was about intellegence testing and that's how i came up with the idea of mnemonics. What do you think i should do? Email them and ask them if I could change my summary?

Thanks for your time and efforts

Farah

Oops, sorry I was late. I'm not familiar with the online registration for the science fair. Can you log in again and edit what you've already submitted? It might be worth a try. If it is a hassle, then I wouldn't worry about it. Your summary is quite nice as it is.