Week 5: Planning Your Investigation

Group formation and research planning

ImportantSet up your group repo

One group member should accept the group assignment and create your team. The other members then click the same link and join the existing team — don’t create a new one. Clone the repo via GitHub Desktop.

Today’s goals

  1. Finalize your group and choose your project topic
  2. Set up your group’s GitHub repo with branches and pull requests
  3. Write a structured one-page research plan
  4. Present your plan to the class (60 seconds)

1. Choose your topic

Browse the curated topic list. Each topic has a clear research question, accessible data sources, and a genuine policy dimension.

→ Project topics list

Before committing, check with your instructor that no other group has chosen the same topic. Ask yourself:

  • Can we access the data? (Download it now and check.)
  • Does the question interest us enough for 6 weeks?
  • Does it map to a statistical test we’ll learn (t-test, ANOVA, regression)?

2. Set up your group repo

Your instructor will demonstrate the Git collaboration workflow. Then your group does it for real:

Step-by-step

  1. Clone your group’s repo (created via Classroom 50 or by your instructor)
  2. Each member: create a branch with your name (e.g. alex-explore)
  3. On your branch: add your name to the team.md file, save, commit
  4. Push your branch to GitHub
  5. On GitHub.com: open a Pull Request from your branch to main
  6. A teammate: review, approve and merge your PR — main only accepts changes through an approved PR, so you cannot merge your own
  7. Everyone: pull the updated main

This is the workflow you’ll use for the rest of the module. Branches keep your work separate until you’re ready to combine; PRs let teammates review before merging.

See the Git troubleshooting guide for the most common problems and fixes.

TipStuck?

Ask on the class board, in Code Q&A. Someone else is likely stuck on the same thing, so asking in public helps them too. Demonstrators check it most weekdays, but they give classmates a chance to answer first.

The board is private to this class, so sign in to GitHub first. If the link shows “404 – page not found”, you’re not signed in, or you haven’t accepted the Classroom 50 invitation yet.

3. Write your research plan

Use the template below (also available as a markdown file in your repo). Complete all seven sections as a group.

Your instructor and demonstrators will circulate to challenge your design: “What’s your control?” “How will you handle this confounder?” “Is your sample representative?”

Research plan template

# Research Plan: [Your topic title]

## Problem

### 1. Research question
What are you investigating? (One sentence.)

## Plan

### 2. Hypothesis
What do you expect to find, and why?

### 3. Data sources
Where will your data come from? What variables? What time period?

### 4. Comparison / control
What are you comparing to? How will you isolate the effect of
interest?

### 5. Potential confounders
What alternative explanations should you worry about?

### 6. Analysis plan
What statistical tools do you anticipate using? (Descriptive stats,
t-tests, ANOVA, regression — link to what you've learned and what's
coming in Weeks 6–8.)

## 7. Division of labour
Who's doing what this week and next?

→ Download the research plan template

4. Present your plan

Each group gives a 60-second pitch:

  • Our question is…
  • We hypothesize that…
  • Our data comes from…
  • Our comparison is…

The class and instructor give brief feedback. Focus on:

  • Is the question answerable with the available data?
  • Is there a clear comparison?
  • What’s the biggest potential confounder?

Extension: break Git on purpose

Optional — for groups who get through the workflow quickly. Nothing later in the module depends on this, but the hour you spend here is an hour you will not lose to a merge conflict in Week 9.

  1. Manufacture a conflict. Two of you edit the same line of team.md on different branches, commit, and both open PRs. Merge one. What does GitHub say about the other? Resolve it — in GitHub Desktop, or on the web — and write down in team.md what the conflict markers meant.
  2. Find out what a PR review can do. Leave a line comment on a teammate’s PR rather than approving it silently. Request a change and have them push a fix to the same branch; watch the PR update itself without a new PR being opened.
  3. Test the guard on main. Your repo only accepts changes to main through a pull request that a teammate has approved. Commit something directly on main and try to push it: read the error. Then rescue the commit — move it onto a branch and open a PR. What does the rule cost your group, and what does it buy?
  4. Write a .gitignore entry that matters. Put a large data file in your repo, commit it, then work out why removing it in a later commit does not make the repo smaller. This is the single most common irreversible mistake students make with Git.

Commit and wrap-up

Commit your research plan via a pull request:

  1. One group member writes the plan in research-plan.md
  2. Commit and push to a branch
  3. Open a PR — other members review
  4. Merge to main

Preview: Next week you’ll learn the formal tools for testing hypotheses — t-tests, p-values, and why they can mislead you. You’ll start applying them to your project data.