BIO3102 Research Methods and Data Management

Research is mandatory to all university students before graduation. The aim of this course is to build the capacity of students to carry out sound and high quality research under minimum supervision. This course will be comprehensive and designed to help students write proposals, design experiments and collect and analyze data in a scientific way. This course is a foundation for doing research at post-graduate level. The course will require knowledge of computer applications as a pre-requisite.

Expected outcomes
By end of this course, the student should be able to:

• Choose and formulate a good research topic
• Apply brain storming techniques in developing ideas about the topic
• Formulate good research questions, hypothesis, objectives and problem statement
• Write good backgrounds and abstracts
• Apply the reading and writing strategies to do a literature review with proper citation
• Design experimental protocols based on scientific experimental designs
• Present results and scientifically analyze them using statistics
• Make claims, back them with evidence, evaluate the evidence as well as make Make scientific conclusions and recommendations based on hypothesis testing 
• Write proper references, draw a research work plan and budget