Report Goals
Where This Fits
Slides help an audience understand one message quickly. Dashboards help an audience explore one question. Reports show the audit trail: data, methods, code-generated evidence, interpretation, limitations, citations, and reproducibility.
Week 10 asks you to make that audit trail visible.
Who Is the Report For?
Write the main report for a non-technical decision-maker: someone who could act on your finding but does not read code. Keep the body in plain language — question, evidence, what it means, what it does not prove. Put technical material such as code detail, package notes, and render instructions in a technical appendix at the end. This is the same audience as your A8 slides, so the two should feel consistent.
The Report Is Not Bigger Slides
A report should answer:
- What question is being asked?
- Which data support the answer?
- What was included or excluded?
- Which outputs were generated by code?
- What does the result mean?
- What does the result not prove?
- How can another person rerun or inspect it?
Reuse Earlier Work
The report should reuse artifacts instead of creating a new analysis from scratch.
| Earlier artifact | Report role |
|---|---|
| A5 corrected plot | Figure |
| A5 caption | Figure caption and limitation |
| A6 Table 1 | Descriptive table |
| A6 methods note | Methods paragraph |
| A6 provenance note | Data source paragraph |
| A7 dashboard note | Audience and KT context |
| A8 slide claim | Results paragraph |
Keep the Scope Descriptive
The term project does not require formal modelling, prediction, causal inference, or hypothesis testing. A strong report can be descriptive if it is transparent, reproducible, and useful for the intended audience.
Report and M3
M3 is a project update, not a final report. The draft should show:
- what evidence is ready;
- what still needs feedback;
- how the dashboard-style product connects to the report;
- what reproducibility risks remain.
Check Yourself
Before writing paragraphs, write one sentence:
This report answers ______ for ______ using ______, and the main limitation is ______.
If that sentence is hard to finish, narrow the report question.