MEDS1001 2023 Assessment Item 2
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MEDS1001 2023 Assessment Item 2
Data Detectives – Scientific report
Now you are at university and you are learning to be a scientist; but what does a scientist do? One set of truly transferrable skills that you as a scientist will develop is defining a problem, devising methods performing experiments to address it, analyse the data and interpret and report your findings (Figure 1).
Figure 1: An example of the research processes typically followed by scientists. You start with a question followed by several sequential steps that finish in communicating of the outcomes.
For this assessment, you will be following some key these steps to write an INDIVIDUAL scientific report that will constitute 15% of your final grade for MEDS1001.
Data Detectives Assessment Task
Regulation of blood glucose levels by the action of the hormone insulin is an essential homeostatic function of the human body. In this task you will visit our diabetes virtual gallery and explore some basic aspects of insulin and signalling as well as think of some of the complications associated with diabetes and ways of prevention. You will gather your own data using the Blood Glucose simulation.
Detailed TASK DESCRIPTION
Your overall task is to prepare a short scientific report aimed at an informed professional audience describing your observations and conclusions about the data collected from the model.
First, spend a little while exploring the 2 rooms in the Diabetes Gallery (https://fmhmedialab.sydney.edu.au/static/app/unity/DDG/index.html). The first room has some objects and videos related to insulin, its receptor and the storage granules in the pancreatic‐ beta cell (things that were mentioned in the lectures). The second room has some examples of diabetic complications and tips for prevention. Make some notes of things that interest you in both rooms.
Next you will enter the third room, the simulation room. In this room you will use the Blood Glucose Data Simulator to generate the actual data for the report. The use of simulations and models is very common in medicine and allows one to explore physiological processes as determined by algorithms that use known data to provide a behaviour of the model.
In this case, the simulation will track blood glucose and insulin over a compressed timeline (7h are represented in 70 seconds). First, you will observe the response of a normal healthy individual. Then, you will be randomly allocated to either a type 1 or type 2 diabetic condition. You should experiment with the impact of insulin and glucose treatment in both the “normal” and the diabetic state. Once you have completed the simulation, your data will be available for download. The data file will contain the unique data from your experiments for both normal and diabetic states.
You will use these unique data to draw graphs explaining what you have recorded.
Based on your graphs, discuss what you have observed and whether your data reflect individuals living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes. How and why is your data different between the normal and diabetic states? It may be relevant to write about the baseline blood glucose and insulin levels, responsiveness to food intake and insulin supplementation.
Describe what is happening at a cellular level. What are the clinical implications for your data?
Remember that this is a data simulation and a simplification of what happens in a real
person.
YOUR CHALLENGE with the data is to:
(1) Construct (i) graphs showing the total blood glucose and insulin levels over time. Create (ii) a table and (iii) bar chart that shows the total above numbers for each. Draw figures appropriate to represent and compare your data.
(2) The next step is to look more closely at the data and compare …
‐ You should explain what your investigations have revealed and explain the
differences/similarities between the normal and diabetic states.
With these tasks in mind, you should collate your observations into a brief scientific report format. Research outcomes are generally published in reputable scientific journals so pay close attention that the papers you include are properly referenced and structured(i.e. Harvard Style).
Your scientific report will consist of the following sections:
‐ Title To orient and gain the reader’s attention
‐ Background. Your background should draw upon items that you found of interest in
the first two gallery rooms to (i) explain an aspect of the cellular physiology around glucose and insulin and (2) describe a complication arising from diabetes. You should support your text with appropriate scholarly references from PubMed.
Your background should introduce and provide context for the aims of the report. In this case, you are comparing data for a hypothetical normal individual with a person living with diabetes. Your introduction should be ~400 words (±10%) excluding in‐ text reference citations.
‐ Data Analysis. The results section generally contains two parts.
o First is a written summary of the results obtained from the experiment. As you will not be including a Methods section, it may be valuable to the reader to understand what you have done to analyse the data. That should be mentioned here (~200 words).
o That is usually followed by the supporting figures/tables/images with their respective legends. All figures must be referred to in the written text so that a reader knows where to find the visual support figure. Figure legends are not included in the word count.
Note that we have said that your figures should be standalone – the reader should be able to understand the figure with reference only to the legend.
‐ Discussion. A scientific discussion brings together the context of the report and how
the results fit with the field of knowledge. A common mistake is the repeating of the results without putting into context what the results mean. Another common pitfall is repeating introductory information. A discussion will allow you to explore how the literature supports and/or disputes your results and research question and should lead to a clear conclusion based on the data/results. You might also mention any limitations of the data simulation. The discussion is the main body of text in a scientific report, and you should allow 400 words (± 10%) for this section.
‐ References. A reliable scientific report will include numerous citations referring to
scholarly articles rather than open websites or blogs. A minimum of five (6) scholarly articles should be referred to throughout your report. The Harvard (Author‐ Date) referencing and citation style is commonly used at The University of Sydney. Click here to learn more about how to reference correctly for your report.
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*Citations and references are excluded from the total word count.
Report Formatting Requirements
‐ Your report should include the following sections:
‐ Title
‐ Background
‐ Data Analysis
‐ Discussion
‐ References
‐ Overall, your report will be 1000 words (± 10%) in length, excluding the titles, in‐text
citations, references, figures and legends. Remember your report should tell a story from start to finish and there is no limit to the number of figures you include.
‐ Use either Times New Roman 12 point or Calibri 12 point font.
‐ Spacing should be exactly 1.5 lines
‐ Page margins should be minimum 2 cm.
‐ Include your SID on the front page.
‐ Upload your final document as doc, docx or pdf.
‐ Writing style should be formal scientific language.
This is an INDIVIDUAL task.
Graduate Qualities
As noted in the previous assignments, assessments are designed to help you to develop skills that will make you a competent medical science graduate and valuable employee.
The aim of this assessment is to develop your disciplinary expertise,
critical thinking and problem solving, written communication, Interdisciplinary effectiveness and influence. You will apply your understanding of medical science in understanding, interpreting and explaining data in an appropriate manner. We want you to learn how scientists communicate and develop your own ability to explain data in a scientific manner. This will include identifying relevant and reliable scientific sources to support your ideas and your interpretation of the data. There is not necessarily only one interpretation of the data – your task is to draw a conclusion and present your perspective with support from the scientific literature. If there are multiple interpretations, you should present arguments for and against.
Your previous assignment was focused to a general audience. In this assignment, you will be writing more scientifically to a professional audience, so the language that you use can change to fit the expected audience. Likewise, the depth of explanation and the structure of that information might also be different. Your ability to write effectively, but also concisely and clearly, is being assessed here.
2023-03-23
Data Detectives – Scientific report