As a culminating assessment in this laboratory course, you will complete a final applied project that will serve as your final assessment. There is no proctored final examination for this course. Your final applied project will emphasize experimental design and the scientific method. The project will be a research plan that you construct for a specific issue related to the physical sciences. This research plan should be about two pages in length. The final applied project is 20 percent of your course grade.

During or at the end of the last week of the term, you will submit the research plan to the Assignments Folder for grading. At two earlier times during the term, your instructor will interact with you on specific parts of the project. At the end of week 3, you should submit part 1(a) to your instructor for approval. At the end of week 5, you should submit part 2(a) to your instructor for approval. No grades are assigned for these earlier submissions; only the final research plan will be graded.

There are three main steps necessary for completion of the final applied project:

Part 1: Selection of a problem to study and an initial hypothesis.

Select an issue/problem/topic from one of the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, earth science, or astronomy.

Propose an initial hypothesis related to the issue.

Part 2: Review current research knowledge.

Describe how you could perform a review of current research on the subject/issue. Identify which UMUC Library/database sources could be useful in your research review. What criteria will you use in the selection of review sources from the web?

Do the results of your research review lead you to suspect that your initial hypothesis is correct, or does it suggest that you should modify your initial hypothesis in some way? If so, restate or revise. Are there gaps in the current research that further research/experimentation/observation might fill and shed light on your hypothesis?

Part 3: Write a research plan based on the results of parts 1 and 2 above.

Suggest a plan to test your hypothesis (initial or revised). What data will you study? How and where will you gather it? What equipment or resources will be needed? How much time will be needed to gather the data? Are there any confounding issues that might affect/influence the quality of your data? If so, discuss how might you mitigate these unwanted effects/influences? Justify all of your statements.

Provide a list of UMUC sources that could be used to review this issue. Include a citation of one article you read.

Provide a list of web sources that could be used to review this issue. Discuss why these web sources would be trusted sources of information on the issue. Include a citation of one site you reviewed.

Suggest how your data would be presented (chart, graph, or table).