6. Wrap up your findings and draw a conclusion
A good conclusion will summarize the process, discuss results, and look to the future.
This section breaks down how to structure your conclusion and they key things to include.
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
How to structure your conclusion
Your conclusion is the part of your project that brings all of your work together. This section gives you the opportunity to reflect on your project and talk about what you could do next.
- Give a short overview of the process: identified a problem, proposed a solution, tested it and collected results. Talk about whether you changed anything as you went along and why.
- Discuss your results---what do they tell you? Are they as you expected? If not, why? This is your opportunity to really evaluate your work.
- And if it didn’t work, why? What do you think happened? What have you learned from it? What would you do differently if you started all over again?
- What’s next? If it all worked as you thought, great, but what’s next? Where could you take this?
- Refine Look at what you’ve written---does it work? You’re telling a story which someone who has never seen your project before should be able to read and understand. Try showing it to a teacher, parent, or friend and see if they understand it.
Remember: results + solution = conclusion
For example, Elif Bilgin had to do her experiment more than once---but she learned from each iteration and tweaked her experiment based on her results. Her conclusion explores each iteration and discusses the trends, as well as highlighting why some trials may not have worked.
You can check out her project here.