STW is also taught by Dr. C. In this class, we work on our skills reading, writing, and editing scientific articles in preparation for our STEM I and II projects. As part of our independent research projects, we ultimately write a STEM Thesis that is a summation of all of our work done over the course of the year. We also work on our skills communicating data and research to an audience, both individually and in groups.
While developing our STEM I project, we also had to create a project notes file, which contains research and notes on scientific articles that we've read concerning our field of choice. As my project is in the field of behavioral science, I read many articles concerning the brain, emotions, behavior, perception, color associations, and how scientists measure these using both self reported data and other methods like fMRI.
Over the last couple of months we've been progressively working on our Literature Reviews, which provide information on all the different facets of our research projects. Mine in particular addresses categories like the validity of self-reported emotions, the connections between the amygdala and the hippocampus, color perception and associations, and the age-related positivity effect.
At the beginning of the development of our independent STEM I projects, we had to create a project brief that ultimately turned into the Project Proposal that we submitted to SEFOS, the science fair project review board. This included a background written to inform about the basis of our project, and then an experimental design which detailed how we would conduct our experiment. Dr. C also asked that we include a timeline and potential roadblocks that we might encounter while conducting this research.
As part of the STW class, we also had to complete a group project regarding a certain statistical test. We had to create a presentation showing when to use it, how it works, an example with a set of data. We also had to make an infographic detailing the test and its uses. I worked with Andrew Yang and Hazelyn Aroian, and we covered the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and the Mann-Whitney U Test. The infographic is included at the conclusion of the presentation.