Week 07 - Your analysis
Week: 8
Topic: The Philosophy Behind Your Analysis
1 Week Overview
| Session | Content |
|---|---|
| Session A | Case-based philosophy + peer review (~75 min) |
| Session B | Workshop: project progress, peer review & method justification (~75 min) |
No student presenter is available this week. Come ready to read, diagnose, and argue.
1.1 Learning Objectives
- Connect the philosophical ideas from Weeks 2, 3, and 5 to to someone else’s flawed analysis before your own
- Articulate and defend your method choice in writing and verbally
- Identify common philosophical pitfalls by diagnosing them in a real scenario
- Assess your project’s current progress against your planned timeline
2 Session A: The Philosophy Behind Your Analysis (75 min)
2.1 ⚡ Part 0: Assignment Check (5 min)
3-5 minutes
Think back to the one actionable item you committed to working on by Thursday.
| Prompt | Your Response |
|---|---|
| My original actionable item was: | |
| Current status (circle): | On track Stuck Needs revision Not started |
| If revising: what’s the adjusted version? | |
| One thing I need to do in the next 48 hrs (“do nothing” is an option): |
2.2 Part 1: Opening. Pulse Check & Minute Paper (10 min)
Respond to both questions in 3–4 minutes:
- “What is the single most important thing you learned in this course so far?”
- “What is the thing you want to talk about in a future class? What topic or question should we cover?”
2.3 Part 2: The Case — “Dr. Reyes’s Grassland Study” (20 min)
2.3.1 Setup (3 min)
You are a peer reviewer for the journal Ecological Applications. You’ve just received the following methods section. Your job: find everything that’s wrong — and explain why it matters.
Title: Nitrogen addition increases aboveground biomass in semi-arid grasslands
Methods (excerpt):
We established 12 plots across 4 ranches in eastern Colorado. Each ranch received one of three nitrogen treatments: control (0 kg N/ha), low (25 kg N/ha), and high (50 kg N/ha). Biomass was harvested from each plot at three time points: May, July, and September of the same year.
To assess treatment effects, we calculated mean biomass per treatment per time point and ran a one-way ANOVA (treatment as the fixed effect) on the September harvest only, as this represented “peak biomass.” We report p-values and conclude that high nitrogen significantly increased biomass (p = 0.03). All plots were located within 5 km of one another on each ranch.
We selected ANOVA because it is the standard method in grassland ecology and because our dataset was small. We acknowledge that data were not fully independent but considered this a minor concern.
Individual choice of reject, revisions or accept.
2.4 Part 3: 🔬 Case Diagnosis — Small Group Work (20 min)
Work in groups of 3–4. Each group gets one diagnostic role you are responsible for that angle, but your findings feed the whole class.
2.4.1 Role Assignments
| Role | Your Diagnostic Focus |
|---|---|
| 🔺 Triangle Auditors | Does the method match the question, data type, and structure? What would the correct model be? |
| 🧭 Framework Detectives | What philosophical framework is Dr. Reyes implicitly using? Where does it break down? What would a Bayesian alternative look like? |
| ✂️ Complexity Judges | Was dropping July and May data defensible? What is lost? Is the model too simple? Could it have been simpler in a different direction? |
| 🔁 Reproducibility Auditors | What would you need to reproduce this analysis? What is missing? List specific items. |
2.4.2 Group Task
- Read the excerpt again as a group
- Prepare a 2-minute verbal finding — one clear diagnosis + one concrete fix