Lab Report Internal Assessment Help: "Design an Experiment Measuring a Trait between Two Populations"

[Cutiepie1097]

Hey guys,

So this is my very first IA within IB Biology I HL and I'm confused. Obviously, our teacher can't help at all and I've tried coming up with ideas and I'm just honestly not sure what he's looking for. And we're also not allowed to talk to each other, so I can't ask other students what they are doing.

Here's the general topic given to us by our teacher:

"Design an experiment where you are measuring differences between two populations (two groups: male vs. female, senior vs. freshman, white vs. black, etc.)

YOU CANNOT TEST HEIGHT. BE CREATIVE AND REALISTIC, YOU MUST PERFORM THIS EXPERIMENT NEXT WEEK."

Originally I was thinking about doing something with colorblindness between males and females but he told me I needed to make sure I have numbers I can manipulate. I'm not really sure WHAT that means and he hasn't explained it to me when I've asked.

Another idea was measuring the length of wrists between males and females (just using a tape measure). It would give me a lot of quantitative data and I could make a detailed hypothesis, as well as have a detailed description of potential errors and factors. Or GPAs between males and females at the end of last year. Or maybe if blue/green/etc. eye color were more common in males or females, or even race or hair color.

Does anyone else have any ideas? Any suggestions?

It is much appreciated!!!!(:

Edited September 12, 2011 by Cutiepie1097

[dessskris]

I like the measuring the length of wrists between males and females one. what other chapters have you learnt? have you thought of reaction time? or reading time? or memory? like for students VS teachers. it's not very difficult to find ideas, just try to find lab examples on the net and try to tweak them (but please do NOT copy them!).

[SoCleo]

I did this one.... Don't do anything with humans. It's not that simple and obviously males are going to be bigger than females blah blah blah. My teacher recommended measuring the length between different flowers- like hydrangea plant flower heads on the top of plant in the sun, and the ones on the bottom of the plant in the shade. Or if you have more than one hydrangea plant, measure the one in the sun vs. the one in shade. But it has to be 10 or more pieces of data (numbers) to perform a t-test for quantitative data.

I did mine on bamboo leaves from different height of plants and/or the plants that were closest to water vs. the ones farther away from the water.

Hope this helps!!

~Cleo

[Guest KAPOWW!!]

I'll be concise:

Plants: Difference in growth between plants watered in the evening and those watered in the morning. Measured over 2 months or so.

Humans: The difference between reaction time in males and females (subjects).

Will edit if I can think of more! Hope I helped!

[RandomPeersoon]

You could talk about fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers with black and white people since they're different.