Masiha has clearly worked hard this year! While much of the report was yet to be finished, his figures were extremely clean, clear, and easy to read.

While the figures were excellently constructed, it became clear as we spoke that he still needed to develop his understanding of the concepts underpinning the statistics and broader analysis. Most of the understanding was there, but not quite enough to allow him to develop the written content and make the necessary connections to the larger research question underpinning the report.

"Scientific writing" is clearly becoming more familiar to Masiha, and he has an excellent understanding of the content necessary for reports.

While the content and overall organization were great, Masiha's writing can still be strengthened at the sentence level (specifically, structuring and organizing thoughts into clear phrases, sentences, and sections of paragraphs as appropriate and avoiding "waffle").

All of the necessary content was already present in the report, and Masiha has gotten much better at both detecting areas in his work that can be improved and coming up with possible solutions. I also want to praise Masiha for doing his due diligence in contacting his teacher to clarify a few aspects of the assignment that were confusing.

While Masiha is rapidly developing his ability to detect where things can be improved in his writing, figuring out how to make the needed improvements can still be a bit paralyzing. As he continues to read and write more, I believe he will naturally develop this intuition... if quicker improvement is desired, however, targeted reading of well-written works (e.g., novels or scientific papers) may be the best route.

Masiha has a "scientist's mind", regardless of how comfortable he considers himself with the content of his courses. He clearly knows how to learn, given how he is able to ask questions that pinpoint where he needs clarification. Also, his ability to reword complicated concepts into clear, simple sentences is among the best I've ever seen!

Unfortunately, Masiha seems to be stuck at a point where he knows how to think about these topics but lacks the foundational knowledge and/or wider context needed to come to clear answers/conclusions. Returning to earlier concepts in both biology and science as a whole (e.g., chemistry, the scientific method, etc.) may help, as well as going beyond the textbook and learning about how these concepts look in the real world as many concepts are too abstract for clear understanding without some sort of concrete example to compare them to.