Using LabWrite to Improve Students’ Lab Reports

Miriam Ferzli and Mike Carter
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC
mgferzli@ncsu.edu and michael_carter@ncsu.edu

It’s a fact: Students hate writing lab reports. When required to write them, students turn in poor quality reports that are difficult to grade. These reports are often an afterthought of lab and show no evidence of scientific thinking or learning. This is where LabWrite comes in. LabWrite is a free Internet site, funded by NSF, to help students learn science as they conduct their laboratory experiments and write their lab reports (to Access LabWrite, go to http://labwrite.ncsu.edu). The immediate purpose of LabWrite is to provide students extensive instructional materials that help them to understand why they write lab reports and to guide them in the larger process of writing effective reports. There is also a broader purpose for LabWrite: to enhance students' scientific literacy. Rather than being just one more assignment, lab reports can offer students a medium for reflecting on and expanding their understanding of their lab experiences—a way of thinking that allows them to make inferences, assumptions, and conclusions about the science they are studying.

LabWrite is a process-based tool, based on an "inside-out" approach to writing lab reports. While the first thing most students think of when starting to write a lab report is the title and the introduction, LabWrite teaches them to start with what they already know—the experiment and findings. LabWrite is divided into four stages—Pre-Lab, In-Lab, Post-Lab, LabCheck—each forming an integral part in the lab process and contributing to the writing of lab reports. Throughout each stage, there are multiple resources that students can use to understand their labs and write their lab reports—tutorials for data manipulation and representation, examples, definitions, “more help” links, and other guides—that offer additional information and advice. LabWrite is primarily a set of web pages, referred to as the LabWrite “Self-Guide,” but it is also available as an interactive on-line tool, the Tutor. In the Tutor mode, students can interact with each stage of LabWrite, answering questions and eventually building their lab report on-line. Although geared mainly towards experimental, hypothesis-driven labs, LabWrite offers parallel guides for descriptive labs, which are so often found in biology courses, as well as for labs in which students design their own experiments.

Although on-going studies involving LabWrite show that students learn science and scientific ways of thinking when writing effective lab reports, proper implementation is the key to success. To help you implement LabWrite, there is a site for lab instructors too. It can be accessed from the main home page. At the LabWrite lab instructor site, you will find help with grading using LabWrite’s Excel sheet, using each part of LabWrite and integrating it with your course, special features and teaching strategies, training teaching assistants, and much more.

LabWrite has not been successful in making students love lab reports, but students who use it learn to see the value of writing lab reports. As one student put it, “Anyone can memorize something for a test, but when you can sit there and explain what happened and relate it to variables and such and why this changed and that happened, then I would say that you’re learning it better.”