Introduction

Body Paragraph #1 – Background:  The outline of the introduction should describe the background of water quality and related issues using cited examples.  You should include scholarly sources in this section to help explain why water quality research is important to society.  When outlining this section, make sure to at least list relevant resources in APA format that will be used in the final paper to develop the background for your experiment.

Body Paragraph # 2 – Objective: The outline of the introduction should also contain the objective for your study.  This objective is the reason why the experiment is being done. Your outline should provide an objective that describes why we want to know the answer to the questions we are asking.

Body Paragraph # 3 – Hypotheses: Finally, the introduction should end with your hypotheses. The outline should include a hypothesis for each one of the three experiments. These hypotheses should be the same ones posed before you began your experiments.  You may reword them following feedback from your instructor to illustrate a proper hypothesis, however, you should not adjust them to reflect the “right” answer.  You do not lose points for an incorrect hypothesis; scientists often revise their hypotheses based on scientific evidence following an experiment.

Materials and Methods

Body Paragraph # 1:  The outline of the materials and methods section should provide a brief description of the specialized materials used in your experiment and how they were used. This section needs to summarize the instructions with enough detail so that an outsider who does not have a copy of the lab instructions knows what you did.  However, this does not mean writing every little step like “dip the pH test strip in the water, then shake the test strips,” these steps can be simplified to read “we used pH test strips to measure water pH”, etc.  Additionally, this section should be written in the past tense and in your own words and not copied and pasted from the lab manual.

Results

Tables: The outline of the results section should include all tables used in your experiment.  All values within the tables should be in numerical form and contain units.  For instance, if measuring the amount of chloride in water you should report as 2 mg/L or 0 mg/L not as two or none.

Body Paragraph # 1: The outline of the results section should also describe important results in paragraph form, referring to the appropriate tables when mentioned.  This section should only state the results as no personal opinions should be included.  A description of what the results really mean should be saved for the discussion.  For example, you may report, 0mg/L of chlorine were found in the water, but should avoid personal opinions and interpretations such as, no chlorine was found in the water showing it is cleaner than the others samples.

Discussion

Body Paragraph #1 – Hypotheses:  The outline of the discussion section should interpret your data and provide conclusions. Start by discussing if each hypothesis was confirmed or denied and how you know this.

Body Paragraph # 2 – Context: The outline of your discussion should also relate your results to the bigger water concerns and challenges. For example, based on your experiments you might discuss how various bottled water companies use different filtrations systems. Or, you could discuss the billion dollar bottled water industry. For example, do you think it is worth it to buy bottled water? Why or why not?  Your outline should at least list some of the resources that you plan to utilize in your final paper to put your results into context.

Body Paragraph #3 – Variables and Future Experiments: Finally, the outline of your results section should also address any possible factors that affected your results, such as possible contamination in the experiments or any outside factors (i.e., temperature, contaminants, time of day) that affected your results?  If so, how could you control for these in the future?  You should also propose some new questions that have arisen from your results and what kind of experiment might be proposed to answer these questions.

Conclusions

Body Paragraph #1:  This section of your outline should briefly summarize the key points of your experiments.  What main message would you like people to have from this report?

References

Include at least 4 scholarly sources and your lab manual here in APA format.