News Release

'LabWrite' site boosts college students’ lab-report skills

Grant and Award Announcement

North Carolina State University

Students hate them. Instructors hate grading them. And increasingly, instead of being seen as tools for investigating scientific concepts and learning how to do science, lab reports have become little more than fill-in-the-blank busywork.

But an innovative Web site, created by two North Carolina State University professors and backed by a new $489,159 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), could reposition the lab report as a worthwhile endeavor for both students and instructors.

"We're trying to improve lab reports and scientific literacy by providing more extensive and appropriate instruction," says Dr. Michael Carter, associate professor of English and the principal investigator for the grant. "Most students get very little if any instruction in writing lab reports."

"Writing is hard to assess and teaching writing is difficult," says Dr. Eric Wiebe, assistant professor of graphic communications and co-principal investigator for the grant. "The lab report is a powerful tool for understanding how to do science. We want LabWrite to help make an institutional change in the way students and instructors think, so that writing a lab report becomes a tool for students to engage in authentic scientific process."

The LabWrite Web site takes students step-by-step through the process of thinking about the lab, including the goals of the lab and the anticipated outcomes, and then piecing together a quality lab report. The site includes suggestions on how to record, describe, corroborate and organize data, and even contains graphing resources that give guidance on how to chart or graph data to create a visually stimulating report. Plus, there are sample lab reports, a glossary of scientific terms and checklists for ensuring that all the goals of the report have been met.

Many students will attempt to write a lab report in a top-to-bottom fashion, the researchers say, starting with the title and the abstract at the beginning of the report. But you can't write an abstract when you haven't looked at your results or thought about how to introduce the experiment or discuss the findings, Carter and Wiebe say. To give students the correct way to formulate a lab report, LabWrite provides a flowchart that suggest working from the middle out – that is, starting with visualizing the data and the results, moving on to detailed discussion of the lab, including the introduction, discussion and conclusion, and then writing the abstract and the title.

"A lab report shouldn't be thought of as a product necessarily, but as an artifact of the scientific process," Wiebe says. "This includes thinking and reflecting on the data, figuring out what the data mean, and understanding how the data relate to the conjectures about the lab. And then pulling all the ideas and data together with visuals and writing to tell the story of the lab."

The two-year, nearly half-million dollar NSF grant follows on the heels of an $87,260 NSF proof-of-concept grant awarded to Carter and Wiebe in 2000. That grant gave the professors the opportunity to test LabWrite over two years in a variety of NC State upper- and lower-level science classes in fields like geology, biology, chemistry and materials science. Carter and Wiebe say students using LabWrite had statistically significant positive results in lab-report scores when compared with students in control groups who didn't use LabWrite. Experiment results also showed improved attitudes toward lab reports.

A companion Web site, gives lab instructors tips on using LabWrite in their classes. Lesson plans and teaching materials are included, as is a rationale for avoiding fill-in-the-blank lab reports in favor of full-blown lab reports.

The new grant money will fund a pilot program at NC State this fall, with Meredith College, Central Carolina Community College and North Carolina A&T State University running tests with LabWrite next year.

Wiebe and Carter are hopeful that the grant will help spur changes that will bring lab reports into a better light for both students and instructors. They hope that the grant and further testing will allow them to perfect LabWrite to eventually become a ubiquitous tool in colleges and universities nationwide. The researchers may then turn their attention to high schools to help get more students excited about science.

###


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.