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Is this a limitation for this experiment?

I've done the beetroot biology practical assessment for OCR and I have the evaluative paper tomorrow. Trying to think of possible questions for revision, one common one is limitations.

Would using a standard solution to estimate the concentration of pigment in your solution be a limitation because it is not an exact measurement of how concentrated the solution is?

Or would the fact that we only did it once with no repeats be a better limitation to explain? (how would that affect results? i dont really understand)


any help appreciated! Thanks! :smile:
Reply 1
Hmm from my past experience of practicals, I'd say expand on your point of only doing one repeat.
You can say that doing one repeat is a limitation as you aren't able to get an average from your results and therefore do not know if it's an anomaly or reliable in any way.
Reply 2
Original post by qtsilver9
I've done the beetroot biology practical assessment for OCR and I have the evaluative paper tomorrow. Trying to think of possible questions for revision, one common one is limitations.

Would using a standard solution to estimate the concentration of pigment in your solution be a limitation because it is not an exact measurement of how concentrated the solution is?

Or would the fact that we only did it once with no repeats be a better limitation to explain? (how would that affect results? i dont really understand)


any help appreciated! Thanks! :smile:



first one is not a limitation because you're using a standard solution through out your whole experiment i.e. you're using the same solution.
Reply 3
Original post by Theodan
first one is not a limitation because you're using a standard solution through out your whole experiment i.e. you're using the same solution.


sorry i didn't make it that clear. We first made 5 solutions with different concentrations of red pigment. (so from colourless to dark red each labelled with a concentration)
Then we conducted the experiment, and compared our solution colour (which had an unknown pigment concentration) to these original 5 solutions, and were told to estimate which one it was most similar to.
Original post by qtsilver9
sorry i didn't make it that clear. We first made 5 solutions with different concentrations of red pigment. (so from colourless to dark red each labelled with a concentration)
Then we conducted the experiment, and compared our solution colour (which had an unknown pigment concentration) to these original 5 solutions, and were told to estimate which one it was most similar to.


Yes, that's a limitation as it involves a subjective measurement which introduces observer bias. You can talk about this in your evaluation section and it would be good to discuss better, objective, ways of measuring concentration (e.g. Colorimetry). It's also not very accurate as you only have 5 stock solutions, a possible improvement to your design would be to increase the number of stock solutions.


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