Formal lab reports must die

Remember formal lab reports from your undergrad days?

Multiple page affairs starting with an abstract, followed by an introduction, experimental,¹ data, calculations and ending with the (dreaded) discussion. These reports did me a lot of good. They made me think deeply about the chemistry at hand. But I struggled; I didn’t enjoy the process. It was the writing as much as the chemistry that made wisdom tooth extraction without anesthetic look appealing.

Many of us thought — and still think — that formal lab reports are something that high school students should do. “They’ll have to write them in university” is a typical reason. As a beginning teacher, it didn’t take me long to see that formal lab report writing is not part of a typical high school student’s skill set. Most secondary school students simply aren’t mature enough to write a decent formal lab report. And more important: these tomes need to be marked, which takes hours and saps a teacher’s strength.

Typically, my approach to laboratory work involves a pre-lab discussion, which “leads students down the path”. This is followed with pre-lab questions, which are often collected and are always taken up before the activity. Pre-lab work allows students to formulate a procedure² and collect data as required. Post-lab questions are assigned. These are short, pointed questions that are easy to grade. In rare cases — with acid-base titrations for example — I ask students for a one-page (maximum) lab report, which includes: descriptive title, abstract,³ tabulated data, balanced chemical equation, calculations and answers to questions. Students find that writing to a maximum, rather than to a minimum, is a challenge — they find it tough to be concise. This is especially true for abstracts; students are usually too wordy. I find that these are hurdles that high school students can overcome. (I routinely ask students to write an abstract as a post-lab question.)

I think that university-style formal lab reports are too much for high school students. A greater level of maturity is required in order for a student to get full value from this exercise. I suggest that we do everyone a favour — keep it simple.

Notes

1. Written in the past tense, passive voice. Imagine if regular people talked like this: “The turkey was brined for eight hours in a solution prepared with 2 cups table salt (NaCl) dissolved in 5 litres of room temperature tap water… dinner was enjoyable… family members refrained from bringing up stories about Dad…
2. I provide a recipe for work that involves anything dangerous, such as (moderately) concentrated acids or bases.
3. Purpose of experiment, general method, (e.g., acid-base titration with NaOH to phenolphthalein end point), result(s).