Re: [Phys-l] Writing a review or lab report

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

It all depends on what the goal of the lab is.

If you want the students to learn from the lab, they will be doing something
where they have not already had the theory behind the lab.  This is
basically the type of lab which is used in PER.  Many of these labs have no
reports, but the students is expected to answer questions which help them to
figure out what is going on.  The prototype of such a lab would be Real Time
Physics, or Workshop Physics.

Modeling does have lab reports, but the format of the report is not the
usual formal report.  Basically the students have to report the results and
provide some interpretation.  In each case they come in and find the
equation or law.  So while there may be rubrics, the style of writing is
unimportant.  The ability to communicate and interpret is the important
factor.  They come into the labe completely ignorant of what they will find
in the end.  This is quite amusing sometimes.  When they found the ideal gas
law by experiments, they acted as if they had no idea what the results would
be.  And it was only until we put the results together and figured out the
general equation that they said "I have seen that before".  Of course they
had in chemistry, but they had no idea what it really meant.  It was just an
equation that they had to manipulate.

Both of these type labs have evidence for effectiveness in improving student
understanding.

But if the goal is purely to have students write a report as practice for
writing professional papers, then you need to have them write it in the
manner prescribed by the relevant journals.  Comparing results to theory is
an artificial academic lab construct which is only done sometimes in the
journals.  In either case students will not learn much physics from doing
this.

I would say that the amount of grammatical parsing should be dependent on
the level of the course.  If you are trying to get them to understand the
physics the grammatical requirements can be a barrier.  So clarity is the
most important factor.  If this is a pre-college course, the best routine
would be to collaborate with the English teachers and have them give a grade
for grammer in their class while you give a grade for the physics content.

The developers of Real Time Physics do not recommend a lab report, but
rather that you give and grade a homework based on the lab.  They
conveniently supply some such homeworks which test the conceptual
understanding.

So I do not do formal lab reports.  If I had nothing but highly advanced
students I might have them do one or two formal reports.  At the senior
level this might be useful, but below that it just makes for more busywork
rather than student thinking.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> What rules and guidlines do you give your students?  Should 
> they write the present or past tense?.. Ie the results were 
> found to be in good agreement or the reults agree well with 
> theoretical calculations...
>
> Thanks for any advice.
> ALex