Goal 2.1 is the ability for students to be able to evaluate, interpret, and apply experimental design and draw valid conclusions from experiments. This goal is designed for students to be able to understand fully what they are doing in lab, be able to repeat this experiment again, and interpret the results received from the experiment. For my two artifacts, I picked a lab report from my introduction to genetic and cell biology class and a lab report from my biology of cancer class. I think these two lab reports really show the growth I have done when it comes to performing experiments in lab and be able to easily draw conclusions from them.
The first artifact was my first major lab report I wrote by myself. The purpose of the paper was to study the differences between the microbial diversity in Looking back at it, I see where my mistakes were in writing this paper. The results section was small in my opinion and did not have much analysis done on the conclusions. I also could have displayed the data better on my graphs. I also was not confident with performing the protocols by myself so I remember asking a lot of questions during the lab period.
The second artifact was a lab report done in biology of cancer and the purpose of it was to manipulate the shapes of various parabens by substituting bromine at positions 3 and 5 on the paraben. In this lab report, I feel like I did better with conducting the protocols since I was in an upper level course and felt more comfortable in a lab setting. Also, I feel like I did better with drawing conclusions and writing more detailed figure legends than my first artifact. This skill will help me in the future when I decide to go back to school to pursue a masters, since I know for a fact I will be performing more labs and writing reports on them.