As you read this, I’m probably on the road back to my university to start teaching the second summer session for Physics 208 - Electricity, Magnetism, and Light. It starts this Wednesday, and it’s the second half of the calculus-based intro physics class. Mostly engineers take it, though I’ve seen a few from scattered other majors. I haven’t done much preparing for it, but I taught the same class last semester and thus there’s not really anything new to put together. I have all my old lecture notes and materials so the only real thing I have to do is make up new quizzes. Students are good at nothing if not gaming the system and they’d notice repeated quizzes pretty quickly.
The thing I most want to improve on from last semester is the quality of the lab reports. We have pre-printed lab manuals which describe the experiment and procedure and provide places to record data. Generally the analysis and calculations involving that data have been pretty decent, but where students really fall apart is writing the conclusions. Three sentences where one of them is “I learned a lot in this lab” will not cut it (though a conclusion that bad is of course rare). To fix this, I think I’m going to have to start counting the conclusions as a larger fraction of the lab grade. Previously they were only about 20% of the grade and thus even a low-credit conclusion wouldn’t hurt too badly.
Why is a conclusion important in the first place? That’s easy: because conclusions represent your ability to both understand what you’ve done and what the results are, and communicate those things clearly to someone who hasn’t done the experiment. This is what they’ll be doing in pretty much any career where they report results to their supervisors.
I’m going to get some conclusions from good physics papers in the published literature that should be good guidance as examples. I will additionally make it very clear that I’m looking for a conclusion that describes the method, results, and interpretation sufficiently so that a person unfamiliar with the experiment would understand what happened. Then I’m going to nuke any bad conclusions especially hard during the first couple of weeks. I hope it works.
If you have any suggestions for your favorite especially lucid (and not too long) examples of concluding paragraphs in the professional literature (not necessarily just physics), I’d love to hear them!
3 responses so far ↓
1 Uncle Al // Jun 28, 2008 at 11:29 am
UC/Berkeley, Boalt Hall, “inert intelligence is the paradigm of institutional racism.” Proper grading compassionately grade redistributes from competent to diverse in compensation for patriarchal historic White Protestant European oppression of Peoples of Colour. Prepare your students for ceding their incomes to the same noble cause.
An advocate makes virtue of failure. The worse the cure the better the treatment - and the more that is required. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.You lack rigorous characterization of the topology and social function of cluelessness.
2 CCPhysicist // Jun 29, 2008 at 1:08 pm
First, a digression: The second time you teach a class is when you can shift your attention from just getting it done to improving areas where you now students struggled the first time or finding a better example … or doing more ‘active learning’ in the classroom. I’ve taught that class 15 times in a row (and a few times like you are doing) and I’m still finding ways to improve it.
Thanks for writing this. It motivated me to finish off my article about lab writing
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2008/06/lab-writing.html
where I include some comments on your article and also link to some others that you might enjoy reading.
You can make it worth more or make it harder to get the points. For your own sanity (ease of grading), you might require that their conclusion contain specific sections so you can easily focus your attention on the key paragraph(s). I give examples in my article. Our reports have a fair bit of that sort of critical thinking in specific post-lab questions so we don’t have to go hunting for it in a multi-page conclusion.
I’d recommend looking at abstracts in addition to conclusions. Abstracts are really hard to write, which makes it a good point of emphasis to separate the A students from the B students. If you wish, you can even make that sort of summary the required first paragraph in the conclusions, forcing them out of the narrative form. Maybe sub-heads like “Summary of Results”, “What we did”, and “What we learned and Implications for future experiments” would do the job for you.
PS to Uncle Al-
What dimension and connectivity characterizes the manifold describing the topology of cluelessness? Is it a Homer’s donut, a toroid, a 2-d surface in 3-space that is isomorphic to Wally’s coffee cup in Dilbert?
3 Uncle Al // Jun 30, 2008 at 10:22 am
http://www.dilbert.com/fast
NEVER use the main gate!
Wally’s coffee cup is a first order model for cluelessness. The torus’ apparent productive contents are illusury, awaiting those who control the hole. Grant funded studies will reveal cluelessness to be
http://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/calabiyau/
with Yukawa potential overlays. Academia fused into interdisciplinary mating balls will exfoliate sheaves of heavily paramaterized elliptico-hyperbolic differential equations. The goal: College graduates evincing high self-esteem who equitably cannot make sense of their diplomas. A Mark 1 prototype occupies the Oval Office. Diversity is America’s strength - education, economics, advocacy, sexual preference. None of that can sustain absent cluelessness.
When a boat founders the only passengers guaranteed to drown are those chained to its oars. The fat bald sweaty manager beating a hollow drum has a flotation device. ?? ???? ???? ??? ??????, ?????? ???????.
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