You have been collaborating with your group on open-ended projects. The final part of each project, however, will be an individual report detailing the results, written separate from the other members of the group.
In addition to a full analysis of the data and conclusions/discussion of your results, you will need to provide the reader with information about the why and how.
Report guidelines
Data and results from the group work can be shared through the wiki and are available to all members to use. You are welcome to discuss ideas, share resources, and talk about interpretations openly and freely.
The report, on the other hand, should be written individually. This is your chance to demonstrate that you understood what the group did and can articulate the details of the experiment.
We will provide a grading rubric for each project, but keep in mind that these projects are more open-ended than traditional experiments and each group will have a different approach. You will primarily be graded on how well you communicate what you did and what conclusions you arrived at. It is less important to us that the final results “agree with literature” or anything like that (though that can and often should be discussed). Some of your projects in fact have no correct answer.
A good report should accomplish the following. It should clearly and concisely…
- …describe what your experiment was about and motivate why it is worth studying;
- …describe how you decided to conduct your experiment (including important details of the apparatus and techniques you employed);
- (This is important because each group is choosing slightly different parameters. If you don't communicate yours, then it will make interpreting the collected findings much more difficult.)
- …present your experimental results and analysis (including not just your data, but also any details about how the data were analyzed that are important for the reader to understand how you arrived at your final results);
- …describe any relevant theory or models which you researched in order to compare you results against; and
- …present the conclusions which you were able to draw from your experiment.
Since the reader for this report does not necessarily share the same base knowledge as you – there's no manual and sometimes no set procedure, for example – the burden is on you to communicate your complex project to the audience with the minimum effort required.
- The “clarity” component means you may need to make sure that you sufficiently explain your experiment and thought process so that someone who wasn't involved can follow it easily.
- The “concise” part means you work on making sure that you should keep your report focused on the results you want to present.
You do not need to include every detail of every calculation or process (since you are not being “tested” on completing certain tasks), but you do need to make sure you provide an easy-to-follow guide to the reader so they can understand how each result or conclusions flows from what came before.