Students will be able to evaluate, interpret, and apply experiment design and draw valid conclusions.

Students in the biology program at Longwood University are expected to learn to evaluate, interpret, and apply experimental design so they can learn to draw valid conclusions from the experiments that they perform while in the program. Coming into the program I was unsure of how to really perform my own experiment without a set of instructions. At Longwood this is one of the very first things students get to experience. For example, in Biology 120 we have control over the experimental design for both projects that we complete. The introduction to the control of the experimental design helped me in the following classes that I would take. One example of the ability to draw conclusions during my freshman year comes from the result section of the second project I completed. This project was based around how does the amount of fertilizer pellets affect the growth of Wisconsin fast plants. This experiment let me explore as a scientist because we had control over what we wanted to study, and this experiment gave me the necessary analyzation skills that would help me later on.

The ability to design an experiment and to draw conclusions from experiments is weaved throughout all biology courses I have taken throughout my 4 years. One project that I could relate this idea to the most is the project I completed in microbiology my junior year. In this course we were tasked as a group to design a project that dealt with microbes. My group decided to test the efficacy of masks in reducing the spread of respiratory droplets. My group was taking microbiology in the middle of the pandemic and masks were heavily used then like they are today. This project really bolstered my understanding of how to draw conclusions from an experiment. I had to look at the raw data we collected from the various masks we tested and then analyze the data. Analyzing the data and evaluating the data helped me grow in interpreting results and drawing conclusions from those results. I feel I have grown in my ability to draw conclusions because of this project.