Argument

The goal of this lesson is to start formalizing the arguments students have been making about the patterns they have been noticing, and to practice using data from models as evidence to support these claims.

Very likely, students have already been making interesting claims, and have been referencing their models to support the claims. However, the connections between claims and evidence have likely been missing.

We illustrated this by showing a claim and some evidence a student previously submitted, and then asking him to come up to the board and explain his claim. The connections he provided verbally, especially what we should notice in the evidence, and why it supports the claim, were not present in his writing. If we were not there explaining this to us, we would not understand his argument.

Today we are going to develop arguments explaining and justifying patterns we have been noticing in the models, using the following template (link to Word doc):

Go through each section of the template, explaining how it helps a reader understand the argument. Emphasize that this pattern of argument is extremely common in undergraduate, graduate, and professional research communities.

We found this was also a good time to remind students that, for some people, these models represent real-world situations which are very painful. We should take our arguments seriosuly.

After going through the template, it may be helpful to go through (and critique) our model template, and then conduct the proposed research. We found it helpful to contrast the methods section with "procedures" students are familiar with from science courses. This is real research, where we actually don't know the answers to our questions, and where we have to use creativity to come up with effective methods.

Research question

Pose a question about the real world.

Introduction

Write a short paragraph explaining why the question is interesting and why it is important. How is it connected to a real-world problem?

Methods

Explain how you will answer your research question. Which model will you use? What data will you report? Will you use screenshots of the model? Will you use plots? Which model parameters will you hold constant? Which parameters will you change? How would this data help you answer the question?

Results

Present your results.

Discussion

Explain how your results answer the research question. Interpret your model results in real-world terms. To what extent is the model an accurate representation of the real world? To what extent is the model an inaccurate representation of the real world?