This assignment can be completed in groups of up to three people and is worth 20% of the marks for this
subject. This assignment is to be completed in two stages:
• Stage 1: Due Friday 10 April at 5pm (i.e. before the mid semester break)
• Stage 2: Due Monday 18 May at 3pm
The purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity to run an experiment of your own and follow the full process of running an experiment. You may choose any topic that you like to perform an experiment on, as long as you are not taking unnecessary risks in conducting the experiment (I will make the final decision whether a risk is deemed unnecessary). Experiments should not be run on animals
or people, and should satisfy the following rules for nil/negligible risk research (otherwise you would be required to apply for Ethics approval through the UTS Human/Animal Research Ethics Committee) Nil/negligible risk research is that assessed as likely to cause no more than inconvenience to participants or subjects. For example:
• No direct interaction between researcher/s and participants
• Anonymous surveys/questionnaires (on-line/paper/phone/person)
• Observational studies where no audio and visual/or visual recordings or photographs are taken and no identifying information is collected
from https://www.research.uts.edu.au/docs/forms/ethics/human/ethics-hrec-levelofrisk.doc Some ideas for different experiments have been suggested at this site by William Hunter: https://www.curiouscat.com/bill/101doe.
Stage 1 - Planning the Experiment
In this section, you will use the checklist in Lecture 1
• What are the specific objectives of the experiment?
• Which factors are likely to be influential?
• Which of these factors will you include in the experiment and allow to take on different values?
What values can they take?
• Which of these factors will you hold constant during the experiment? At what level for each one?
• What characteristics will you measure?
• Will you measure the experimental units or smaller observational units?
• How will you do the measurements?
• What limits exist in terms of units? time? materials
and the additional items in the checklist in Chapter 2 of Dean and Voss (available here https://find. lib.uts.edu.au/?R=OPAC_b2514171)
• Choose a rule by which to assign experimental units to the treatment factors
• Specify the measurements to be made, the experimental procedure, and the anticipated difficulties
• Specify the model
• Outline the analysis
• Calculate the number of observations needed
to plan your experiment. This plan should give a general description of the experiment and answer each of the questions in the list above.
The experiment must contain at least three factors - at least one treatment factor and possibly some blocking factors if appropriate. You will submit this plan by the due date at the latest and feedback will be given. All plans must be approved by the subject coordinator before proceeding to run the experiment. Unapproved experiments will receive a mark of 0 for the entire assignment.
Stage 2 - Performing the Experiment and Writing a Report
Once you have been given approval to proceed to run your experiment, you may do so. Once you have collected data, you will need to perform a full analysis, including the testing of any assumptions and performing transformations as appropriate. You will then prepare a report (one per group) that follows the following format:
• Executive Summary: This should be a summary of your experiment and results that is no longer than 100 words.
• Introduction: This section should introduce the problem, present the objectives of the experiment, and discuss the factors that might be influential.
• Methods: This should describe and justify your choice of factors and blocking variables, describe your experimental design and the process that you have undertaken to collect your data.
• Analysis: This should contain the statistical analysis that you perform as well as the data summaries that illustrate the relationships in your data.
• Conclusion and Reflection: This section will briefly summarise the results of the experiment.
An important part of this section is to describe the challenges that you had in conducting the experiment, and make suggestions (other than a larger sample size) that you would suggest if you were to repeat the experiment. Given the resources available for this survey and the fact that it is a teaching experience, it is not expected that you will have produced a flawless piece of research, but it is expected that you will be able to critically evaluate the work. In this section, you should also explain how you incorporated the feedback from Stage 1 into the experiment, if any has been provided.
• Appendices: Include detailed output goes that is too bulky to fit in your results section. The data collected and SAS code should be submitted by email to [email protected]. The information that you provided at Stage 1 should be integrated into the final report in either the Introduction or the Methods section.
The allocation of marks for this report will be given in the marking rubric.