ENV-7033B: Statistics and Modelling for Scientists using R:

Formative Assignment

Formative Due date: 3pm 17th March 2022 (WEEK 7)
Submission: via Blackboard file upload

Introduction
This Formative task is designed to give you a flavour of what the final assessment will be like, and
will allow you a ‘dummy run’ of preparing and submitting your work in the way the summative will
be submitted (as an R project folder named with your student number, zipped and uploaded to
Blackboard as a zip file).
The Formative assignment is a single analysis task - it will follow a similar format to the final
summative assessment, which will involve three similar tasks.
The dataset for this Formative task contains information on plastic ingestion in oceanic fish species,
derived from a meta-analysis of 129 studies conducted worldwide. Your task is to use RStudio to
write a script testing some hypotheses about fish vulnerability to plastic ingestion.
Your answer should be written as an **Rmarkdown file**, including fully reproducible code and
explanatory text. If you find Rmarkdown really problematic, you can also write it as a simple R script
(".R" file) but make sure you include all the necessary explanatory text in the form of annotations!
Detailed task instructions and data files:
The files for the assessment are available to download from Blackboard > Formative Assessment, in
the file ‘Formative_assessment_2022.zip’. You will need to download and unzip this folder to your
computer. Make sure you then work from the unzipped version of the folder on the computer you’re
using, rather than the zipped version!
This folder contains an R project with step-by-step instructions for the task. There are two versions
of the instructions: an html file and an Rmarkdown file. The content is identical, but you can open
the latter file in RStudio and use it as a template for your answer file if you wish.
The data file you will need is also in the folder. The code you provide in your answers should run
using the data file exactly as it is in its original state (this is important to ensure your code is
reproducible).
Submitting your work:
Your submission must be in the form of a zipped folder containing the R Project, your R code and
data files (it can be the same folder you downloaded!). You must name your submission folder with
your student number, exactly as follows – ‘Formative_studentnumber.zip’.
Submission of this zip file will be via the Formative Assessment submission point on Blackboard, as
a file attachment.

Feedback:
I will provide feedback on your work by adding annotations directly to your Rmarkdown or R script
file. I will be looking at several aspects of the work:
- whether or not your code works to produce valid outputs (statistical analysis, figures, tables)
- whether the code is clear and well organised (doesn't contain errors / defunct or
unnecessary lines)
- whether your explanations for the decisions made in your analysis (e.g. types of models you
use, transformations, model selection stages etc) are clear and robust
- whether your interpretation of the statistical outputs is clear, complete and accurate
- how well formatted/presented your output plots and/or tables are.
The aim of the feedback is to help you develop the skills needed to do well with the summative
tasks.