Yet another accuracy/reliability question... (1 Viewer)

[LuthienAdrianna]

I have an assignment where I have to find a plant pathogen/insect pest and write a leaflet about them. Part of the question asks me to evaluate how I could improve the accuracy and reliability of my information - I'm assuming that's the information I got off the Net. How do I do that one? It's not like I can repeat my searches or something to improve reliability...

 

[Survivor39]

I think your teacher is looking for how you can improve your experiments. E.g. if you look at 1 leaf and write about the appearance and state that it was a fungal infection, would that be valid and reliable? How about state that you can look at 10 or even 100 leaves and describe the charactersitics and the pest on them?

 

[LuthienAdrianna]

So... examining more leaves with similar symptoms to the first leaf to see if they all have the same disease would improve accuracy/reliability?

 

[Survivor39]

Yes, it would increase accuracy and reliability of your RESULTS. In the real scientific world, most experiments are performed in triplicate (3 times) before a paper is submitted for review and publication.

May be I haven't explained it well. okay. If you look at 1 leaf and saw a green bug and the charactersitic of the leaf is that it is yellow, compared to other green leaves. Then, woul dit be accurate or reliable to conclude that this green bug causes yellowing of all leaves?

No.

So what you need to state is that you need to look at more leaves in order to make a link between this bug and the yellowing of this particular type of leaves.