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Stage 5: Review

This section covers the Conclusions and Evaluation sections of your investigation. Conclusions provide an opportunity to draw all the strands of the investigation together.

First there must be a clear summary of your data with a reference to the main trends. Quote figures.

Some questions that you should ask are

• Do your results support your hypothesis?
• What's the evidence - quote figures, refer to tables and graphs
• Can you link all the things you measured in a coherent explanation ?
• Refer back to the ideas in your Introduction
• Do your data confirm or contradict ideas from other sources?

For investigations into distributions, use words like rare, abundant, evenly distributed and unevenly distributed. For investigations into the 'success' of a scheme, there needs to be some comparison of 'before' and 'after'.

The concluding comments after statistical tests need to be written carefully. This is an example of a good concluding statement

The result is significant at the 5% level of significance. Therefore, it is 95% certain that there is a significant relationship between distance from the source and hydraulic radius for the River Onny. There is a strong correlation because the Spearman's Rank correlation coefficient is close to 1. It is a positive correlation. As distance from source increases so does hydraulic radius. As it is statistically significant, it is unlikely to have arisen by chance.

In the evaluation, look at both the validity of your method and the limitations of your conclusions. A good evaluative comment will show how limitations in the method affect the validity of the conclusions. Identify anomalies and uncontrolled variables. 'Human error' is not acceptable - don't make yourself look stupid. If you are stuck for ideas, a useful thing to remember is that a short field investigation can only provide a 'snapshot' of much larger processes.