Lab Reports
At the end of the experiment, your team will hand in a complete lab report. This is your chance to communicate your work in a style similar to what published scientific journals would require (with a little extra info for your TA). This report must include three components:
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A Journal: A clear and concise discussion of what you did, how you designed your experiment, and what results you got, written so that an absent student could understand and repeat your experiment. If you followed false trails that you gave up, you should explain them here with your reasons for giving them up.
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Data and Interpretation: A presentation of your data in a form that would be easy for an absent student to understand. Include a discussion of what your data means, what conclusions you’ve drawn from your data, and a persuasive case to convince your reader that your conclusion is valid. Keep in mind that a record of raw (un-manipulated) data would never be published by a scientific journal--what of the data that you have collected is necessary to make your case? Is this data sufficient and convincing?
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Evaluation: After you’ve had a chance to see what data and conclusions other groups have gotten, it’s important to go back and reconsider what you’ve done. Here is where you discuss how you could improve upon your experiment (design or analysis), in light of what you learned during lab and during the class presentations. This is also the place to expand upon the interdisciplinary nature of these labs--how are the things you have studied in other science classes connected to what you have done and learned here? Do you see other possible applications of these research ideas and experimental techniques?
Grading
The lab grade makes up part of your total course grade. This grade will be based on your team’s lab reports and your individual participation in the lab and the class discussions. Your grade will not depend on whether or not your numerical results agree with some accepted standard but on how well you conceived and carried out the experiment.
The grading for each lab is as follows:
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Criterion: Lab Report (as a team)
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Points for a 2 week lab
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Design and thoughtfulness. Did your team do a careful and thoughtful job in creating your experiment, and was this thought reflected in the journal?
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7.5
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Clarity and completeness. Did your team explain your experiment so that someone could reproduce it?
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7.5
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Persuasiveness. What conclusions did your team draw from your data and were you able to back up these conclusions with this data in a convincing way?
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7.5
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Evaluation. After observing the experiments of other groups, were you able to critique your own lab, propose constructive changes, or explain why your experiment was better than those of your classmates? (The question you are answering in your evaluation is, “If I got to re-do this experiment next week, how would I do it differently?”)
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7.5
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Criterion: Participation (as an individual)
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Contribution to team presentation: Did you participate constructively in your own group's work (protocol development and data collection)? Did you actively participate in both the preparation of the report/presentation and its delivery?
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3
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Contribution of other teams’ presentations: Did you ask useful questions or make comments that were valuable to the other teams’ reports of their evaluations? Did you participate in both class and small group discussion?
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3
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