Analysis and Conclusion Highlights
Analysis:
Your analysis is your chance to highlight important trends or observations about your data. The only thing that can be discussed here is your data…if you didn’t measure it or observe it, it doesn’t belong in your analysis. You don’t explain things here — no maybes — but you point out things from your results in the previous sections.
For example, it is ok to say that “In the data collected it can be seen that the plants with caffeine consistently grew faster than the plants without caffeine, averaging 2cm of growth a day compared to water’s one.” It is not ok to say “the increased metabolism of the plants due to the caffeine caused them to grow faster” because you did not measure the metabolism of the plants.
Conclusion:
This is where you try to explain your data. The most important job of the conclusion is to use the theory that you explained in your background to explain why your results were what they turned out to be. Use all of your knowledge about your subject to explain how your results were achieved.
The second thing a conclusion does is discuss any possible errors and suggest further experiments that could be done to further your understanding of the results, or make the experiment better.
Third, the conclusion needs to tie back into why people care about your research and experiment. The conclusion should start very specifically (with explaining your data) and end very broad (or why anyone cares). This is opposite of your background which starts broad and ends narrow.
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