Requirements for Laboratory Reporting and Rubric for Grading

Forest Hydrology

Spring 2016

The objective of each lab report is to convey the rationale, methods, results and interpretation of the measurements we take during the lab section. While many of the labs will have specific quantities that you will be asked to compute, reporting only these quantities is NOT sufficient for reporting. What follows is a detailed rubric for what is expected in lab reports, and the specifics of how they will be graded. Each lab is graded out of 5 pts.

Criteria 1: Formatting (1 pt)

The report should look professional, with a cover sheet containing, at a minimum, your name, the name of the lab, and the date. If the lab measurements were done as part of a group, please indicate which group.

Each report should contain the following sections:

- Introduction, where you describe the rationale for the lab

- Methods, where you describe what you did

- Results, where you report what you found (making sure to answer ALL of the questions embedded in the lab documents)

- Discussion, where you interpret what you observed. If you cite any references (always impressive), please reference them in a section at the end of the document.

Figures that are created as part of the work should be embedded in the document, and a legend provided for each one that describes what it is and gives a figure number that can be referred to in the text.

Tables of information should be formatted for clarity, and given a table number so they can be referred to in the text.

Criteria 2: Content (3 pts)

Each lab report will contain a number of questions and objectives. Make sure you address ALL of them, and make sure that the reader knows when you are doing so. While the introduction and discussion sections can be brief, they need to contain sufficient information to allow a reader to follow what was done (methods), why it was done (intro), what was found (results) and what that means (discussion). Please pay particular attention to the discussion.

For the most part, the content will be specified by the questions in the lab document. If you don’t understand something, or are not sure how to report your results, please contact the instructor or TA.

Criteria 3: Prose (2 pt)

The goal of scientific writing is to be clear, concise and thorough. I will evaluate your attention to your prose, with a particular emphasis on your grammar, spelling and clarity. The point of a lab report is not to simply deposit all the findings, but to create a narrative that addresses, why, how, and what. As a rule of thumb, write the report so that next year’s Forest Hydrology class could follow what you did and why. Remember that borrowing large bodies of text from other sources (including the lab handouts) is plagiarism, a serious ethical offence. Please err on the side of writing this in your own words.