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

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

The act of writing may not be the important factor.  Learning to communicate
using correct words and being logical may be the domininant factor.  Shayer
& Adey showed a 15% increase on the English national exam in English when
the students were exposed to Thinking Science.  But TS does not have any
report writing, and indeed most of the communicating is verbal.  There is
some writing, but it would be short explanations and not even approaching a
lab report.

Certainly there is the factor that someone who reads a lot acquires a better
feel for the language and a wider vocabulary, but that is not something
acquired by writing lab reports.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> Professors in other disciplines have remarked that they can 
> usually tell which students have taken a lab course that 
> stressed report writing because those students write better 
> papers in the non-science class.  We think this is because 
> the thought process I outlined above is valid for research 
> papers in other fields, except the student is not performing 
> the work itself; rather, they are reading about the work of 
> others when they read their bibliographic sources.  It is 
> probably easier for students to tell the story about work 
> they did themselves, and they learn to do that in their 
> science courses.  Then, when they have to apply the process 
> to a research paper in the humanities, they have to think 
> about what the author's purpose was as they read each 
> bibliographic source.  If they can make that transition, 
> which many do, they can write well in just about any discipline.