Project Checkpoint 4 - Preliminary Results
| Possible Points | Due Date |
|---|---|
| 50 pts | April 14th - Before Class |
Overview
For the fourth project checkpoint, you will be writing the first draft of the results section for your paper containing any results that you have for the project thus far. This means you will be describing the outcomes of any initial experiments that you performed and providing preliminary answers to your proposed research questions. It is OK if you do not know all of the details of your results yet, and we hope that writing this section will help you reason about and finalize the results section and direction for the project.
Checkpoint Instructions
Preliminary Results
Expected Length: (~1-2 pages)
Your overall goal in the preliminary results section of the paper is threefold: (i) you should provide the reader with a (i) preliminary answers to your research questions that you proposed (ii) you should discuss the initial implications of these research questions (e.g., why is what you found important), and (iii) illustrate your results through descriptive figures and/or tables.
In order to receive full points for this project checkpoint, your Preliminary Results section should include the following:
- Answers to Research Questions: You should organize your section around the answers to each of your proposed research questions. It is OK if you do not have a concrete answer for each RQ yet. For those RQs that you are still working on, succinctly describe what you will work on for the remainder of the semester in order to answer them. It can be useful to first describe the results in detail, referring back your defined metrics or methodology when appropriate, and then summarizing the answers to the RQs in boxes. See this paper of mine for an example of this format.
- Implications: Simply answering your research questions is not enough. You also need to provide some insight into what the answers mean why they are important to the research community or to industrial practitioners. You can accomplish this either through a separate discussion section, where you delineate learned lessons, or through individualized discussion subsections when discussing each RQ in your results section. Given that you currently only have preliminary results, this section need not be entirely flushed out for this project checkpoint. However, you should think carefully about the initial implications of your current results and begin to formulate the most salient findings.
- Figures & Tables: A figure is worth many words. In order to provide a more intuitive understanding of your results, you should use figures and tables to convey things. Figures (e.g., charts, graphs, etc.) are typically preferable over tables when possible as they can convey information in manner that is easier to infer patterns from (See my past lecture on InfoVis). Take inspiration from the papers that we have read in class so far, and think about what visualizations may be effective for the data that you are trying to show.
Submission Instructions
Project Checkpoints should be submitted as a PDF via Blackboard to the appropriate assignment.