I was just wondering what others are doing for General Chemistry (I or II) lab reports. I have tried shorter memo-like reports for experiments as well as traditional full reports.
Does anyone have other ideas that they find help students improve writing and comprehension of the material/techniques?
I am currently in the trenches grading many general chemistry and inorganic lab reports. I wonder what strategies you use to teach and grade reports. I provide students with detailed guidelines and a grading rubric. They seem to have no problem following the format but they still struggle with presenting a logical analysis of their results that lead them to a viable conclusion.
I thought it would be fun to prepare a list of pet-peeves for lab writeups to include in my lab manual after grading this last batch of lab reports. I figured, "tell them what you want" up front. I do that, but some of these get missed, since they are more "tell them what you DON'T want." So, here is my preliminary list. Very tongue in cheek. Not sure if I would edit them before putting them in the lab manual or not. Probably not much. Keep it light. Thanks to Scott for the last one.
Does anybody want to add to the list or share their own?