Description: Laboratory Inquiry

Due Dates:

Week of Sep 6, initial proposal due in lab. For guidelines on how to write the proposal, see ?? in Chapter ??.

Lab, week of Sep 27, first draft. Bring two copies of the draft, one for instructors, and one for your inquiry grading partner. Please do not staple the papers. Any extensions desired for this draft must be negotiated with your inquiry grading partner because their homework depends upon your draft.

Oct 18, in-class oral presentations

Week of Oct 25, in lab, final draft Guidlines:

• Use paper clips but not staples.
• Print and copy on one side of the page and use standard–weight letter–sized paper.
• Put your name in the header of each document so that it appears on each page, and number pages.

Purpose: Create a quantitative data set in a controlled laboratory setting and subject it to statistical analysis.

Background: This assignment takes place in a formal laboratory setting. Your instructors will tell you what scientific equipment you have available to select from. The questions you can ask will be constrained by the equipment. However, your ability to collect quantitative data should improve because you will be able to work with instruments not typically available at home. You may not be as inventive as you can be when pursuing questions that make you curious at home, but you should be able to perform more precise work. You should perform an investigation chosen from the first and third types listed in Chapter 1; investigate an hypothesis, as in Section ??, or measure a function as in Section ??. Plan to use statistics in evaluating your results, and take your data with the idea in mind that you will subject them to statistics later on.

Length: 3 – 5 typed pages. It is generally not a problem to exceed this length.

Report: Please include the following sections:

1. Title.

2. Abstract. This paragraph should explain the purpose of your inquiry, and then summarize the main results. It should be written in present or past tense. Write this section after you have completed all the work. Imagine that you are trying to prepare a single paragraph that will be published by itself in a newspaper to explain to huge numbers of people what you have found.

3. Introduction. This section should explain the motivation for your inquiry, and should incorporate background information including theories and models. An introduction explains the “hook” to the reader— in other words, what is the significance of this inquiry and why did you decide to spend time investigating it? It also provides enough essential background information to ground the reader about current research in the field.

4. Experimental design. Imagine in writing this section of your report that you are preparing a lab manual. Your goal is to enable other people to reproduce your experiment. Therefore, you will need to include a description of all the materials you used, and diagrams that explain how the apparatus was constructed. It is perfectly appropriate for you to explain wrong steps that you took, so as to warn others away from repeating your mistakes.

5. Analysis, including an appropriate statistical treatment of the data and explanation of whether your findings are statistically significant.

6. Conclusions. State in this section what you found in your experiment and what you have learned. You should set yourself the goal of being honest. On the one hand, you should not minimize the effort you have put into the experiment, and you should not dismiss or underestimate your own results. On the other hand, you should not claim to have found things that your results do not support. You are free to write about how you might do the experiment otherwise if you could do it again, and to make suggestions for yourself or others to pursue in the future.

Data.You should include enough raw data to enable evaluators to check your results. You can either include the data in the body of the report, or else in an appendix. In some cases, you may choose to provide the instructors with electronic copies of your data.

Comments on Project: For this assignment, you may use equipment in PAI 4.14, which is similar to the kind of technology and equipment you will have access to in a well–supplied science or mathematics department in secondary schools. After a first laboratory session in which you explore equipment, you should turn in a brief description of the experiment you intend to perform. This proposal will give us the chance to provide some preliminary advice on the direction you are taking.

Comments on Report:

• Introduction. From the perspective of UTeach master teachers who have guided several hundred students through science fair projects, it is the introduction that illustrates how well or how poorly a student is prepared to conduct an experiment. Again, as you learn to write introductions that provide context for your own inquiries, you will develop skills in assessing your own students’ abilities to provide a rationale for their work.
• Experimental design. For a teacher, the ability to provide a clear and accurate description of an experiment is very important, both so that you can guide your own students, and also so that you can describe innovative projects you have developed to other teachers.
• Analysis: Students in this class sometimes view statistical analysis as cumbersome and irrelevant, The UTeach Master Teachers have found that most high school students struggle mightily with this aspect of inquiry reports. Many high school students can master the technical skill of putting data into a calculator or spreadsheet and punching buttons to spew out their stats but few to none are capable of explaining what these mysterious values tell them about their data. This fatal flaw has caused more than one aspiring science fair student to not make the final cut for the next level of competition. Your experience with the discussion of your own data through statistical analysis will provide you with the requisite skills to guide your students through similar explanations, allowing them to draw conclusions that are supported by their work. Master Teachers become truly masterful when they can demonstrate that their innovations in teaching are impacting student achievement in their classroom significantly. As you experiment with innovation in your classroom, you will want to gather data and apply appropriate statistical techniques to determine if your innovations are working. A cogent discussion of statistical techniques employed to analyze your data will convince colleagues to follow your example, administrators to support your efforts and provide resources that you need. In addition, the more prestigious education research publications require statistical analysis of data. Well–documented studies that are statistically validated will also enhance your applications for grants and allow you to get even more funds for your classroom.

Grading: This inquiry will be evaluated according to the Inquiry II Grading Checklist. You will be paired with another student in the class, and the two of you will read and assess each others’ assignments. The instructors will grade your first draft by checking that you made a good faith effort to complete each of the major sections of the report, and by checked that you turned the assignment in on time. The peer grade of your draft will not enter directly into your grade, but it will play a role in the grade of your final writeup. Your final draft will be evaluated attentively. Instructors will pay particular attention to whether corrections suggested concerning the first draft have been implemented in the final writeup. These suggestions can come from peer and instructor evaluation of the first draft, or from comments during the oral presentation. Note that your final inquiry writeup need not be accepted if you have not submitted a draft on time, or have not delivered a presentation, or have not graded your partner’s inquiry.