You will be required to use a lab notebook throughout your course of study this year. This will serve as your lab and activity diary and is to be brought to class every day. Think of this as the place where all thinking associated with labs and activities will be recorded. While you should ensure that submitted work is neat and legible, much of the purpose of this book is to serve as your scratch paper as well. By the end of the year you will have a comprehensive record of all that you have accomplished in this course. I will periodically collect and check your progress, although not every time that an activity is completed. Here are some things to keep in mind about your lab notebook.
Every page should be numbered (in ink) in the upper-right corner- Only use blue or black ink when writing in the lab notebook
- Mistakes should be crossed out – no erasing or white out
- Write only on the right side of the lab pages for entries you wish to submit
- All data collection, notes, ideas, processing must be shown in the notebook
- Label the front of the notebook with your name, class, period
The first page is reserved for the table of contents, updated as entries are madeNo photocopies are allowed to be taped into the book, with the exception of graphs- The top of the first page of every activity should have the proper labeling (date, topic etc)
- Even when working in groups, each person should have a copy of the collected data
Ugh – how I truly hate grading lab reports. To point, if there was one aspect of the course that I would put off until absolutely necessary it would be the evaluation of lab reporting. I am in the middle of trying something new this semester, students post lab results on a Tumblr blog, and this has been a mixed bag of results so far.
On the one hand, it had freed both the students and the teacher from the heinous process of overly-structured lab notebooks. Nothing kills a lab, and I mean NOTHING, like an ornate lab formal lab report. While the guidelines are clear they are infused with countless small details that are easily overlooked, especially by a student who has six other classes to attend. (As a side note: I am always startled by this fact when I think of it in the abstract, objective way that is detached from my insulated world.)
But it truly IS important to learn how to operate as a lab scientist and leaving this overt coaching out of the class process leads to such wide variation that reading whatever is posted becomes almost unbearable. Maybe the solution is to have a broad rubric which makes it easier to grade holistically. But what would that look like?
Data
- Data is anything directly recorded, including units, organized in a table
- No calculations or interpretations or conversions of any kind allowed
Calculations
- Show one example of each type of calculation using data from the lab
- Title, Formula, Number Example
- Then summarize all calculation results in a table
- if you plot a graph then this is mentioned in this section
Discussion
- discussion of results is included here
- what are the trends? what did you expect? how did it differ from your results?
- what did you conclude from the lab? (be specific)
Purpose
