Isaac Asimov once quipped, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it), but ‘gee, that’s funny …’ ” The phrase is exciting because it means the scientist noticed something and realized that it could be significant. When it doesn’t happen this way, the dialogue sounds more like, “Nope. That didn’t work either. Maybe I should try this… Nope, but a little closer. Now I’m going to try that… Not much different. Maybe I’ll try the other thing… Possibly better. Let me try it a few more times… Oh, what if I try something else?… Yes, I think that mostly worked…”
The latter version pretty much describes the path I followed in teaching students to keep a lab notebook. I hit upon inquiry labs all at once, a few years before inquiry was as much at the forefront as it is now. The challenge was always getting the write-up to be relevant to the thought process that went into designing the experiment, and also for it to bear some resemblance to what is expected in a research lab.
Like most teachers, I started with what I had learned when I was in middle & high school: objective, materials, procedure, results, conclusion. The problem was always how to deal with having students think through the experiment and do a high-level plan in advance, but to write the detailed procedure after they actually worked out the details.
As I was reading about different lab notebook formats, I ran across something I liked in Introduction to Organic Laboratory Techniques, A Microscale Approach., by Donald L. Pavia, Gary M. Lampman, George S. Kriz, and Randall G. Engel (Philadelphia: Saunders
College Publishing, 1990). Pavia et. al. suggested writing a scheme as a high-level, objective-based look at the experiment, and then writing the detailed procedure afterwards. I started having my students do this, but they would often write so much detail into the scheme that it was largely indistinguishable from the procedure.
Eventually, I figured out how to communicate what goes into the scheme (which I now call the plan) so that the plan would be short and sweet, but still useful as an experimental plan. This year’s “aha” was that the plan doesn’t need to describe how the data will be analyzed, but it does need to explicitly mention each quantity that needs to be measured.
However, the problem that remained was that during the experiment, students would jot down procedure notes and data onto scraps of paper and copy the information neatly into the lab notebook afterwards. The lab notebooks looked neat, and the write-ups contained everything they were supposed to, but the lab notebooks were not serving the purpose of being the place where all original procedure notes and data were first committed to paper. This hadn’t been a problem with cookbook labs, because the students were just transcribing an existing procedure, which is easy to do neatly. But with a procedure of their own devising, their need to have it look neat and orderly was not something they were willing to give up.
The compromise I hit upon is to require a notes section after the plan, and have the students write the cleaned-up procedure separately afterwards. The notes section is meant to use notebook pages to replace the scraps of paper containing the original data and notes about the procedure. The only things I’m looking for in the notes section are words that convey key points about the procedure and numbers for everything that was measured. As long as these are findable, the notes section can be completely haphazard.
I’ll see how it works with the next experiment, but I’m feeling optimistic that after seven years of tweaking and trying, I might finally be close to a lab write-up format that I’m happy with.
Whenever I hear about getting students to use lab notebooks for their work as you are trying to do, I always wonder what real, professional, lab notebooks look like.
My understanding of the theory is that the lab notebooks should contain everything relevant to the experiment, recorded contemporaneously, and be a permanent record. As such, I wouldn’t expect a lab notebook to be neat and orderly.
I’ve heard of lab notebooks with papers (printouts, receipts, etc) taped or stapled to relevant pages, etc.
But in high school labs, I’ve never seen any real examples of how the professionals do it.
Other than the difficulty of getting real examples which don’t contain proprietary information that folks are willing to share, is there any pedagogical reason against showing what a lab notebook really looks like?
Yes, lab notebooks in industry are collections of notes, scratch paper, and anything else relevant. When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry and kept a lab notebook, any time we had to include printouts we had to tape them in on all four sides and we had to sign our legal signature across each piece of tape such that the signature extended onto the notebook page and onto the paper that was taped in.
As ACW pointed out in the following comment, there’s a struggle between having them practice what they might do in industry, and teaching them some skills relating to communicating about their experiment (and also having something I can give a grade for).
I think this is one of those places where the school’s legitimate need for fair measures of performance is at war with actually introducing the kids to the spirit of science. Perhaps you’ve seen real scientists’ lab notes. They are usually a random tangle from one end to the other, and the things get neatened up only when preparing results for publication. Realistic science notes would be impossible to grade … and yet they have this sparkle of joyful, vigorous investigation, rapid trial-and-error cycles, and so on, that bring home what science is all about. I don’t have a clue how to resolve the dilemma, and your compromise seems as good as any.
Agreed. With an inquiry lab and this sort of hybrid write-up, I’m really grading them on three separate things:
1. Their ability to come up with and implement a procedure to accomplish an objective. (This is the “do the lab” part, not the writing part.)
2. Their ability to write down original data. (This is the new-to-my-students “what an actual lab notebook is like” piece.)
3. Their ability to communicate what they did in a way that’s comprehensible to others. (This is the rest of the “high school” part of the write-up. It’s useful for a grade and for teaching kids how to organize information about an experiment into an informal communication.)
I worked as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company for five years right out of college, so I have industrial experience working in an industry where I kept a notebook. My notebook was a little more decipherable than some of the others, but any time I had to formally communicate results to my boss, I wrote him a 1-3 page report.