lab 6 Writing Workshop and lab report template (1)

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Apr 3, 2024

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Lab 6: Writing Workshop The purpose of this week is to support the writing of your first full lab report. After this workshop, you should be able to describe features of good and bad lab reports and apply the general lab rubric to the lab that you are documenting. Introduction In this writing workshop, you will learn the criterion of a good lab report and also look in detail at how the general lab report rubric will apply to the particular lab you are documenting. In the end, you will write a formal lab report based on [lab 4: Snell’s law] individually . What makes a good and bad lab report? 1.1 (5 points): (Peer discussion) What are elements or characteristics of the best lab report you can imagine? Use this space for recording your individual thoughts, interesting ideas from your lab partner, or notes about the class discussion of this question. 1.2 (5 points): (peer discussion) What are elements or characteristics of the worst lab report you can imagine? Use this space for recording your individual thoughts, interesting ideas from your lab partner, or notes about the class discussion of this question. Page | 1 A great lab report is characterized by clear and cogent writing that effectively communicates the underlying scientific principles. It would have a well-organized structure that guides the reader through the experiment and its outcomes. The report acknowledges all sources of information, ensuring appropriate citations are included. Figures should be clearly labeled and referenced form the text. The writing style should be concise and precise, eliminating unnecessary jargon and focusing on the essential details. The report maintains a logical flow, providing clarity on the context and the processes used in the experiment. Lastly, the results are well-documented, with significant figures correctly used, ensuring the data’s accuracy and reliability. This combination of elements contributes to a comprehensive and insightful lab report. A good sign of this would be if someone who reads the lab report can follow it and repeat the experiment. A subpar lab report is characterized by unclear writing that does not effectively communicate the scientific principles at play. It lacks a coherent structure and logical flow, making it difficult for the reader to follow the method used. The report may contain plagiarized content and lack proper citations, undermining its credibility. The writing is often verbose, with extensive explanations that are not concise and include extraneous information. The report does not adhere to a consistent standard of significant figures, compromising the accuracy of the data presented. Furthermore, there is a lack of clarity about the experimental process, leaving the reader unsure about the methodologies employed. These shortcomings result in a lab report that falls short of academic standards.

How to apply the rubric 2.1 (5 points): (Peer discussion) Review the general lab report rubric (you can download it from Canvas). The rubric is written generally so that it applies to all of the labs that you will later turn into lab reports both in this and future quarters. How will these general guidelines and requirements apply to the specific lab that you are documenting? Use the space below for recording your individual thoughts, interesting ideas from your lab partner, or notes about the class discussion of this question. Plagiarism and citation style When you present someone else’s work as your own, you are plagiarizing their work. Plagiarism is a serious case of academic dishonesty. Matters of academic dishonesty are referred to Weinberg College’s Assistant Dean for Academic Integrity for investigation. To avoid being dishonest in this way, you should properly credit (cite) the original author of the work. One big challenge with plagiarism in an academic context is that different fields have different standards about what content needs to be credited and how to credit that previous work. Here’s what those standards are in the context of this physics lab. What should be cited: You should provide credit for work that someone else created and specific facts that aren’t common knowledge. This includes material from lab reports (which were created by your instructional team) but does not include laws of physics such as energy conservation and Newton’s 2 nd Law (which are considered common knowledge). How you should cite: There are many styles of citation: MLA, APA, Chicago, and IEEE to name the most common. If you are comfortable with one of those, you may use it. If you are unfamiliar with all styles of citation, we recommend providing information about the source of the material in a parenthetical as in the example below. For these lab reports, it is perfectly appropriate to cite encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia as well as your physics textbook. Example reference 1: Crown glass, for example, has an index of refraction of 1.52 (OpenStax University Physics, Volume 3, Section 1.1). Page | 2 The Introduction should include some background information about Snell’s Law, explaining any variables and equations present across the Lab report (In this case n, c, v, and the definition of refraction and TIR). It should also include a purpose statement about the intent behind conducting this lab and this specific experiment (here: how we could practically use Snell’s Law to determine the properties of materials). The report should outline the apparatus used, how it was setup and how the experiment was carried out in terms of data collection and analysis, types and methods used . This should be clear to allow someone to recreate the experiment accurately. Results: explain why using the results analysis methods we used was the right way to go about it, and describe the results and experimental process, with some sort of conclusion that aligns with the purpose of the experiment.

Example reference 2: Figure 3 shows a photo of our experimental setup (Northwestern University PHYS 136-3, Lab 7: Atomic Spectra worksheet). 3.1 (5 points): (Peer discussion) With your lab partner, come up with one example of a situation where you think you would need a citation and one example of a situation where you think you would not need a citation. Record your two examples (as well as whether or not those situations require a citation) in the box below. (You may ask your TA if you are not sure.) Lab Report Title Introduction The purpose of the introduction is to orient and provide context to your reader, so you don’t just throw them into the deep end of a lab report. This section should be relatively short (somewhere between one to three paragraphs) and include the following three items: some context for the physics or experiment being studied, a clear statement of the purpose, and an extremely concise statement describing the experimental setup that you will use to study the physics. You may introduce important equations in this section if you wish. Always be sure to define the variables that you use. The context component is the most challenging part of this section. Some common ways to do this are listed below, with examples.  Describe some historical context related to the experiment. o “The Scientific Revolution saw many firsts, among them the first measurements of the speed of sound. Pierre Gassendi made the first measurement of the speed of sound as 448 m/s in the 1600s. In 1738, a group from the Academy of Sciences in Paris took an expedition with the sole purpose of making a precise measurement of the speed of sound and measured it as 340.9 m/s (Greenslade). The current accepted value for the speed of sound in air is 331 m/s at 0 degrees Celsius (Ling).” Page | 3 Needs a citation: Suppose we were to compare our results to another source of information for the purposes of finding similarities, the other source would have to be cited to ensure academic integrity. Doesn’t need a citation: The speed of light does not need to be cited, it is considered common knowledge and is well established.

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The following references would be at the bottom of the page or at the end of the lab report. Note that we are not looking for a particular citation style, just enough information that your reader could reasonably locate the source of the information themselves. Greenslade, Thomas B. The Physics Teacher . 15 , 240 (1977) Ling, Samuel J. and William Moebs and Jeff Sanny. University Physics, Volume 1 from OpenStax. Table 17.1.  Relate the experiment to common experience in daily modern life. o “Elementary-school-age children often learn that you can tell how far away a storm is by counting the number of seconds between the lighting flash and when you hear the thunder and then dividing that number of seconds by five to get the distance of the storm in miles. From a physics perspective, this is a simple “distance equals velocity times time” calculation – the speed of sound in air is roughly 1/5 miles/second.”  Describe how the physics concept relates to other concepts in the field of physics. o “The study of waves includes both transverse and longitudinal waves. In transverse waves, the oscillating motion of the wave is perpendicular to the direction of motion, while in longitudinal waves, that oscillating motion is parallel to the direction of motion. Two good examples of transverse waves are a wave on a string and light. A good example of a transverse wave is sound.” o “One property of waves is that they propagate at a particular speed. This speed can be measured in many ways. For example, the speed of a wave on a string can be measured by tracking the position of the wave’s crest with time. Sound is also a wave, albeit one that is more challenging to see than a wave on a string.” It may be appropriate to cite some of the information that you present in your introduction. In physics, we don’t cite information that is common knowledge. This means that you don’t need to cite the major physics formulas that you use, or factoids that you could easily verify with a quick search in an encyclopedia (or Wikipedia). You should cite the information if it takes you some effort to find or verify (that’s why I included the Greenslade reference above) or if you’re reporting a specific measurement (that’s why I included the Ling reference above). In many cases, your intro textbook is an excellent source and you can use that as a reference. If you need a citation, we don’t have a required format – just provide enough information that your reader could reasonably locate the source of the information themselves. Methods The purpose of this section is to describe your data collection and processing methods clearly enough that a classmate could read your lab report and re-do your experiment. This section should include a description of the equipment and materials used, the lab procedure, and the analysis procedure in your own words. You may use figures from the lab handout if you provide some reference for them: “The photo of the experimental setup was taken from a lab Page | 4

handout.” will suffice. You should make it clear what you measured and how you measured it. If you use equations in this section, be sure to define all of the variables that you use. This section will likely be between one and three paragraphs long, though an experiment with many details may have a longer “Results” section. If the experiment was completed in parts, you have a few choices. You are not required to report your work in the order in which you completed it. If you think a different ordering would be clearer for the reader, then change the ordering. You could list all the methods in this section, all the results in the next section, and then all the discussions in the discussion section. If you do this, you might want to use sub-headings to guide your reader. You could also separate your lab report by experiment and within each experiment heading, report the methods, results, and discussion for that experiment before moving on to the next. You could also lump the methods and results sections for each experiment together and end with a single common discussion section. Examples of these structures are shown in the cartoon in Figure 1. Figure 1: Two different ways to structure a lab report that describes multiple experiments. Results The purpose of this section is to present your measured data and analysis clearly enough to convince your reader that you did the experiment as you said and that the conclusions that you will draw and discuss in the next section are well supported. If you measured it in the lab, it should be included here. This section should be a mix of text, tables, graphs, equations, and example calculations. You must present all your measured data (with units!) in some form, and you must have some text in paragraph form regardless of what your experiment is. This text should guide your reader through the data and analysis. Exactly what type of other content you include in this section will depend strongly on the lab you do – if you didn’t make any graphs during your analysis, then you won’t include graphs in this section. If you only took a few measurements, then you may not need a table. If you took hundreds of measurements, it would make sense to present your results as a graph and omit a table or attach it as an appendix to the end. If you laid out the data Page | 5

processing with equations in the “Methods” section, then you would only need to reference the equations, rather than repeat them (e.g. “The values in the third column were directly calculated using equation 2 from the Methods section, with the raw recorded data being recorded in the first two columns.”). This section will likely have a page length somewhere between 3/4 of a page and 2 pages. You may screenshot the data tables from your worksheet without reference. The table formatting isn’t particularly unique and that’s your data that you collected! Don’t forget units! If you’re showing example calculations, you don’t need units in every step, but they should be present in final results. Discussion This section is where you share what you think about your results and answer the questions: Do your data allow you to support or reject what you are seeking to verify, or are the data inconclusive? Why/why not? Your reader should be able to read this section and know what your conclusions are, how they are supported by the data, understand the context around your conclusion, and believe that you have thought about your results beyond just “here’s what the number is.” The section should most likely begin with a short statement of your conclusion and description of the experimental results that support that conclusion. If you’ve already stated your main results in the Results section, you still need to repeat it here. In this short statement, you’re responding to the purpose of the experiment that you laid out in the Introduction. This part of the discussion should be somewhere between 1-4 sentences in length. You may go over that length if you want, but be sure that you are doing so deliberately After you summarize your main results/conclusion, you should spend a paragraph or two providing your reader with some additional comments or context around your results. This can take a variety of forms:  Compare your results with a value in the literature, a second measurement, etc. o Example: “My result is a little bit higher than the tabulated speed of sound for 0 degrees Celsius. Since the room temperature was comfortable and most definitely above 0 degrees, this makes sense.”  Identify the statistical error that contribute the most to your final precision. Page | 6

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o Example: “My largest source of uncertainty was finding the locations of the anti- nodes. It was challenging with this setup to determine exactly when the sound was at its maximum, so I assigned a large uncertainty to that value and that large uncertainty propagated to the results.”  Discuss possible systematic errors and how those would affect the data. o Example: “We assumed that the speaker provided a solid, fixed end to the tube that sound could reflect from. The speaker, however, doesn’t perfectly fill the tube. This shouldn’t impact our measurement of the speed of sound calculated from the pulse since the sound wouldn’t travel to that part of the tube before we made our measurement, but it could impact the generation of the standing waves. It could make them less ideal certainty, but also provide a longer L value than expected. This would mean that the wavelength of the standing wave is actually longer than I calculated, which would in turn mean that my calculated speed of sound is systematically lower than the actual value. My speed of sound for this part was actually a bit higher than in the first part, so I don’t think this effect caused much systematic error.”  How could you improve the experiment? o Example: “The microphone is a bit wobbly – it tilts a little bit when you let it go – and this makes my position measurements less reproducible. If there were a way to support the microphone better while still allowing it to move smoothly in the tube, that would improve the experiment.” o Example: “I only measured one standing wave. It would make for a better speed of sound measurement if I measured multiple standing waves, calculated the speed of sound with each, and then took the average of those results.” Exactly which of these you choose (and how many) will depend on your lab, but rarely do you need all of these. If a theoretical or tabulated value for your quantity is available, you must make a comparison to that value. If there is not a known value for your specific experiment (as might happen with a coefficient of friction or an index of refraction), you can still compare it to similar values. As an example, coefficients of friction should always be between 0 and 1, while indices of refraction should always be greater than 1 and almost all tabulated values are less than 4. If your results don’t make sense, that’s fine, but you must acknowledge that in this section. The above list is not exclusionary – if you have additional thoughts about your experiment, share them in this section! Page | 7

lab 6 Writing Workshop and lab report template (1)

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