The work you did to analyze your data will help you write your lab report, but you should not treat the questions you answered in homework L1 as an outline of your lab report. Here is some guidance about how to integrate some parts of your write-up into your lab report, and what to leave behind.

The biological hypothesis and justification you wrote for part (a) belong in your introduction, usually in the last paragraph of that section.

Include a statement of the statistical test and the the software you used at the end of your methods section. You can accomplish this in one or two sentences. You can find the citation for R by calling citation().

Explicit statement of the statistical hypotheses, code, and figures of a null distribution do not belong in your lab report. Your reader will know what test you chose when you report your results in standard form.

Results of a statistical test should appear in the results section, in standard form. When you describe your results, you should not just state the statistical test- also describe the data using medians and interquartile ranges.

A graph of your results absolutely belongs in your lab report. If you have unpaired data, please draw the group medians on the plot. You can use the sample code below to help. If you have paired data, using a plot like we did for the rat karma data set is appropriate.

Remember that all figures should have well-labeled axes. The title of your figure should be in the figure legend, not at the top of the plot.

Causation and generalizability are things you can address in your discussion section, as are thoughts about how future scientists might extend your work.

Here is sample code to plot a stripchart with group medians

reaction_times <- read.table(url("http://www.rossmanchance.com/iscam2/data/SleepDeprivation.txt"),
                            header=T)

median_deprived <- median(reaction_times$improvement[reaction_times$sleepcondition=="deprived"])
median_unrestricted <- median(reaction_times$improvement[reaction_times$sleepcondition=="unrestricted"])

stripchart(improvement~sleepcondition, 
           data=reaction_times, 
           method="jitter", 
           vertical=TRUE, 
           xlab="Sleep condition", 
           ylab="improvement (ms)", 
           pch=1)

segments(x0 = 0.9, 
         x1 = 1.1,
         y0 = median_deprived,
         lwd = 2)

segments(x0 = 1.9, 
         x1 = 2.1,
         y0 = median_unrestricted,
         lwd = 2)