Special Teaching Tools


Because LabWrite is a web resource, it offers a great amount of flexibility for students and teachers. The teaching tools described here provide options that allow you to broaden the scope of your lab classes. You can choose different approaches to lab reports and can take advantage of teaching resources to help your students learn the finer points of writing effective lab reports.

Descriptive Labs
Designing Your Own Lab Experiments
Partial Lab Reports
Graphing Resources
Sample Student Lab Reports

 

Descriptive labs

The default lab report in LabWrite is the hypothetical, or standard, lab, based on establishing and testing a hypothesis. However, there are some labs that don’t lend themselves to making hypotheses. We call these descriptive labs: the emphasis is more on following a lab procedure and describing what you observe. You could be doing a lab that focuses on learning new lab techniques, determining an unknown, collecting observations on specimens, etc. Instead of establishing a hypothesis, students are asked to raise questions about the lab in the Introduction and to return to those questions in the Discussion.

LabWrite provides the entire sequence of stages for descriptive labs, PreLab, InLab, PostLab, and LabCheck. Access to the descriptive lab guides can be found at the students’ site on the homepages of each of the LabWrite stages.


Designing Your Own Lab Experiments

There have been more and more calls recently for allowing students to participate more fully in science by designing their own experiments. Some labs have students build up to an experimental design at the end of the semester or quarter; in other labs, particularly more advanced labs, students design experiments for every lab.

LabWrite encourages student-designed experiments by providing a set of questions that leads students through the critical issues of the scientific method. Each question builds on the responses to the previous questions, from defining the problem to establishing a hypothesis to designing an experiment to test the hypothesis. Students can also find a sample experimental design that they can follow for each of the questions.

LabWrite provides the entire sequence of stages for Designing Lab Experiments for PreLab, InLab, PostLab, and LabCheck. Access to the Designing Lab Experiments can be found at the students’ site on the homepages of each of the LabWrite stages.



Partial Lab Reports

Some lab instructors ask their students to write parts of a lab report instead of a complete report. For instance, students may do the Results section in the first lab and Methods and Results in the second lab and so on until they build up to a complete lab report. LabWrite offers a guide to writing lab reports in this way, too.

The key to the LabWrite approach, though, is that it has students write a one-sentence summary of the parts of the report that they are not asked to write in full. The result is that students develop a good understanding of the scientific logic of the whole lab report even if they are asked to write only a partial report. By the time students write their first complete lab report, they are already familiar with the full structure of it.

See Partial Lab Report on the PostLab Homepage.



Graphing Resources

Oftentimes lab instructors don’t have time to provide the extensive help some students need in using Excel and making graphs. LabWrite’s Graphing Resources fill that need. It provides a user-friendly Excel tutorial and detailed and accessible guides to creating many kinds of graphs. It has guides that lead students through decision trees for determining whether to use tables or graphs and what kinds of graphs are appropriate to the data. It provides a tutorial in designing tables. It even has guides on significant digits and error bars.

Check out these student guides under Graphing Resources in the Resources homepage.



Sample Lab Reports

Many students, particularly those in introductory labs, ask if they can see a good lab report so that they have a better sense of what is expected of them. LabWrite makes a variety of reports available, each one presented in a straight version and in an annotated version. These sample labs act as valuable learning tools because students can see explicitly how the step-by-step instruction in the LabWrite PostLab guide has been applied to a completed lab report.

There are lab reports from a variety of fields. There are both hypothetical and descriptive reports and reports using quantitative and qualitative data.

You can find Sample Lab Reports under Additional Resources in the Resources homepage.



 
 
 

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