Failed Biology EE first draft on Chinese herbal medicine on bacterial growth - Help.

[abelkoontz]

YAH SO MY TEACHER GAVE ME A 14/36 SO I FAILED

Basically, I kind of know what I need to work on but i don't either like. She said my Criteria C (Investigation) was incomplete but i dont get what that means. Like how do I demonstrate the theory behind apparatus and techniques used, and show limitations? Idk how I'm supposed to show "more knowledge and understanding of the topic studied" and present my info in a clear logical way? And also what does "clear argument" mean. Also, how do i demonstrate intellectual iniative? omfg can someone please explain these thanks. 

[swl]

Chinese herbal medicine and bacterial growth seems to be an extremely popular topic for a Bio. EE. Maybe thats why intellectual initiative was marked down. Or perhaps you did not have enough background information. 

[IB`NOT`ez]

Could you elaborate on your questions with more clarity and examples? 

"how do I demonstrate the theory behind apparatus and techniques used, and show limitations?"

Idk man that seems pretty self-explanatory. Justify why you use this equipment because of that. Were there any environmental factors/constraints on why you had to use certain kinds of equipment instead of others? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using your methodology; would they affect your results?

"Idk how I'm supposed to show "more knowledge and understanding of the topic studied" and present my info in a clear logical way?"

With presenting your information at least, make sure you have headings and sub-headings for each section, such as introducing new concepts and organizing things into sections like Methodology, Data Processing, Conclusion, Evaluation etc. 

To show more knowledge and understanding of the topic, I guess you can start off with providing more background information onto your experiment e.g. the species of your bacterial growth, the nature and biology-related aspects of your Chinese Herbal Medicine, the biological mechanisms on how Chinese Herbal medicine affects their growth etc. Be sure to explain with diagrams/images, provide academic sources to support your content, and cite them.

"clear argument"

I'm not too sure on what to advise with regards to this. All I can say is so long as you're discussing everything in relation to your hypothesis, which is pretty much your argument e.g. "Chinese Herbal Medicine will cause the bacteria to RIP" and then everything you talk about connects to that -- you should be fine.

As for "intellectual initiative", this is where I think, your own personal engagement will have to come into play. Did you make any modifications to your experiment? Were there certain things that hindered your data collection/processing, did you notice any anomalies or strange trends that did not support your hypothesis? When you comment and analyze on these things, this might be what your teacher meant by showing "intellectual initiative". 

Hope this helps; I could be wrong in all these tbh as I'm not even doing a Science EE, but my Biology teacher said that a Bio EE is just a bigger IA, and all of the above can apply to IAs. 

Edited October 23, 2016 by IB`ez

[kw0573]

I wouldn't really worry about intellectual initiative unless you want to do more experiments. The other concerns you brought up are more about revision.

The EE is not just only a description of your procedure and your results. You should provide enough explanation to justify your research question in context of existing findings and why exactly you set up the experiment the way you did. Don't worry about word limit for now and just write everything you can think of to justify any minor step, no matter how insignificant it may seem. Then later when you revise, you can see that the size of dishes/tubes/containers you used may not be as important as why you chose a particular apparatus over potential substitutes. Only when you have clearly explained this aspects can your procedure and results have more meaning about what you found and how you found it. So a lot of knowledge and understanding / clear logic just come from very thorough revision that ensures you have included all the important stuff you can say about your experiment and present such coherently. 

[abelkoontz]

12 hours ago, kw0573 said:

I wouldn't really worry about intellectual initiative unless you want to do more experiments. The other concerns you brought up are more about revision.

The EE is not just only a description of your procedure and your results. You should provide enough explanation to justify your research question in context of existing findings and why exactly you set up the experiment the way you did. Don't worry about word limit for now and just write everything you can think of to justify any minor step, no matter how insignificant it may seem. Then later when you revise, you can see that the size of dishes/tubes/containers you used may not be as important as why you chose a particular apparatus over potential substitutes. Only when you have clearly explained this aspects can your procedure and results have more meaning about what you found and how you found it. So a lot of knowledge and understanding / clear logic just come from very thorough revision that ensures you have included all the important stuff you can say about your experiment and present such coherently. 

Where should I put all these justifications? Intro? Methodology (e.g do I just right a paragraph called justification)? 

[abelkoontz]

18 hours ago, IB`ez said:

Could you elaborate on your questions with more clarity and examples? 

"how do I demonstrate the theory behind apparatus and techniques used, and show limitations?"

Idk man that seems pretty self-explanatory. Justify why you use this equipment because of that. Were there any environmental factors/constraints on why you had to use certain kinds of equipment instead of others? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using your methodology; would they affect your results?

"Idk how I'm supposed to show "more knowledge and understanding of the topic studied" and present my info in a clear logical way?"

With presenting your information at least, make sure you have headings and sub-headings for each section, such as introducing new concepts and organizing things into sections like Methodology, Data Processing, Conclusion, Evaluation etc. 

To show more knowledge and understanding of the topic, I guess you can start off with providing more background information onto your experiment e.g. the species of your bacterial growth, the nature and biology-related aspects of your Chinese Herbal Medicine, the biological mechanisms on how Chinese Herbal medicine affects their growth etc. Be sure to explain with diagrams/images, provide academic sources to support your content, and cite them.

"clear argument"

I'm not too sure on what to advise with regards to this. All I can say is so long as you're discussing everything in relation to your hypothesis, which is pretty much your argument e.g. "Chinese Herbal Medicine will cause the bacteria to RIP" and then everything you talk about connects to that -- you should be fine.

As for "intellectual initiative", this is where I think, your own personal engagement will have to come into play. Did you make any modifications to your experiment? Were there certain things that hindered your data collection/processing, did you notice any anomalies or strange trends that did not support your hypothesis? When you comment and analyze on these things, this might be what your teacher meant by showing "intellectual initiative". 

Hope this helps; I could be wrong in all these tbh as I'm not even doing a Science EE, but my Biology teacher said that a Bio EE is just a bigger IA, and all of the above can apply to IAs. 

Thanks for the thorough comment! I pulled a "****ty-IB-student": my EE is due next week lol. Don't do this. 

[kw0573]

4 hours ago, abelkoontz said:

Where should I put all these justifications? Intro? Methodology (e.g do I just right a paragraph called justification)? 

... That may work. I wouldn't say a paragraph is enough though. What may works better is that you incorporate this throughout the essay. I was thinking if your EE was mostly absent of all this, add about 600-800 more words and polish it down to about 350-500. You just want to explain every step of your design and procedure clearly, without giving the false impression that you were just blindly following some procedure you found on the internet.