science experiment write-ups - conclusions

[Hoggirl]

What should be in the "conclusion" section of a science experiment write up? Ds and I are disagreeing with this. He says it should only include information obtained from the experiment. I don't disagree, but his are winding up as generalizations of his observations and are only about one sentence long! Shouldn't he be deducing something? We are doing Apologia Physical Science right now, and he just completed Experiment 14.1. There isn't a whole lot to the Apologia experiments, so maybe I am expecting too much? If you and your children have done this experiement, would you mind sharing what you think would be an acceptable "conclusion"?

 

Thank you!

[Susan C.]

What should be in the "conclusion" section of a science experiment write up? Ds and I are disagreeing with this. He says it should only include information obtained from the experiment. I don't disagree, but his are winding up as generalizations of his observations and are only about one sentence long! Shouldn't he be deducing something? We are doing Apologia Physical Science right now, and he just completed Experiment 14.1. There isn't a whole lot to the Apologia experiments, so maybe I am expecting too much? If you and your children have done this experiement, would you mind sharing what you think would be an acceptable "conclusion"?

 

Thank you!

 

Writing up experiments was a tension here too, I emailed Dr. Wile and he actually wrote up an experiment for us to use as a guide. I pasted it inside the science notebook. Some experiments don't need a long conclusion, but the student should at least write a conclusion to the hypothesis of the experiment (if there was one), or at minimum, what was learned by observing.

[MyThreeSons]

I put quite a bit of emphasis on the conclusions. I don't necessarily expect an elaborate conclusion, but I do want to see that they understand the concept that was demonstrated.

 

An aside here: I teach Physics at our co-op, using Apologia. IMNSHO, the labs are really more demonstration than experiment.

 

Back to what I want to see in the conclusion:

 

a verbal summary of the results -- "As the drop height was increased for a given mass, the time to collision also increased. The relationship was approximately linear. As the mass was increased for a given drop height, the time to collision essentially remained the same."

 

an explanation of the concept -- "The acceleration due to gravity is not affected by mass of the object dropped."

 

possible reasons for any differences in results from what "should have" happened -- "The calculated value for acceleration due to gravity was 8.9 meters per second squared versus the expected value of 9.8. This may have been due to the inaccuracy of the stopwatch used, the reaction time of the person operating the stopwatch, and/or inaccurate measuring of the initial height."