Illinois Junior Science
and Humanities Symposium

Yes, the Results and Discussion/Conclusions are the heart of the research paper.

Yet, what do you think is the longest part of most students' research papers?

Most students devote more pages to the Introduction than any other section.  

The Results should include:

1. Both NARRATIVE and TABLES or FIGURES (graphs). While tables and graphs aid the reader in understanding the narrative portion of your Results, tables and figures ALONE do not constitute Results. Include both narrative and tables or figures, without redundancy if possible. The narrative portion should report the data of your study and call attention to any trends that are important. Do not interpret the data in this section, however. Look at the first two paragraphs of Raleigh's Discussion and Conclusions. In the first paragraph she reports the results for the fifty adults in her study. She tells how many were eliminated, how many prints could still be lifted on days three and five, and how many adults prints were visible on day seven. In the second paragraph she reports the results for the 50 children in her study. She does not interpret the data, but she provides narrative to report her data and provides visuals as well in Figures 1 and 2.

2. A measure and indication of statistical significance. This can be as simple as calculating a mean and a standard deviation. A mean is an average, or the sum of the observations divided by the number of observations. If you calculate an average, then you must also provide a standard deviation, or how far, on average, the observations are from the mean. The more variation there is in your data, the larger the standard deviation. If the standard deviations do not overlap, then you can feel confident that your data are significant. If, however, you have overlap, then you might consider conducting additional tests of statistical significance. In Raleigh's case, she has used a chi-square test and she tells her degrees of freedom and the confidence level.  

Acknowledge the limitations of your study. Raleigh addresses the differences between natural, ambient temperatures and a controlled study since this might be a question which the reviewers might raise. She also addresses her controls for cleaning the subjects' hands, pressure applied during fingerprinting, and examination of slides. She addresses the sample size used as well. In each case, she explains her justification for her methods.

Do the data introduce new questions and new problems for study? Sometimes your study will bring up additional questions which need investigation. This is the place to address that issue. Examples from Raleigh's paper include: "Crime scenes obviously occur at many different ambient temperatures, and at cooler temperatures, the difference may not exist. This is an area for future imvestigation." Also, "A tighter control would be to ..." or "This study could be strengthened if..." or "A reasonable follow-up to this study would be to have the glass slides..." These examples indicate that the researcher has examined all points of view and is thinking about how she could have improved her project.