What Is a Timeline Study?
A timeline study is what scientists refer to as a longitudinal study. This type of study measures changes that occur within a study population over a period of time. Since students generally have a limited amount of time to develop a science fair project, timeline projects are going to evolve from year to year.
First Year Timeline Study
The first year that you work on your timeline science project is going to involve the most work. During this year you will be setting up your hypothesis, your experiment and selecting your test population. You will also need to collect baseline data from your test population. This information will be used to compare test results to after each year.
Second Year Timeline Study
The second year in your timeline science project is going to be pretty easy. The main components of your project have all ready been established. Your only really work will be to collect data on your test population and to compare it against the data collected in your first year. You will need to illustrate the data changes in graphs and charts.
Third Year Timeline Study
By the third year of your timeline study you will basically doing the same thing that you did in year two. However, this year you will have more data to work with so you will be starting to see trends in the changes to your selected variables. For example, if you are working on a medical science fair project then you may start to notice that the treatment is either working or not working for the population. You will need to make note about trends you are starting to see, yet you cannot draw any concrete conclusions on what this means, just yet.
Fourth Year Timeline Study
By the fourth year of your timeline study you will have a lot of data to work. If this is the designated end of your timeline study then you will need to do a more comprehensive analysis of your data. This analysis will need to establish clear trends in your data and you will need to explain why you got the results that you got. You may need to do additional research at this point to update the original background research that you did in year one.
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