Hi everyone, today we're going to go through one of the most important things that you learn in
high school science and also one of the things that students tend to struggle with the most,
and that's how to write a scientific report. Let's get started! So the first thing that your
report needs is a title, and the title should give the reader some idea as to what to expect
when they read through your prac report. What are you discovering? What are you investigating?
What are the key things in your report so that if people wanted to search for it on Google,
or through some sort of database that could search for keywords, it'll come up in your title? So it
needs to be something that summarises your whole report in just a handful of words - usually about
6 to 8 words is fine. In this particular example, we're going to have two balloons and one of these
balloons is going to go into the fridge where we expect it to contract or shrink because of
the cold air. And so, an appropriate title for this particular experiment could be something
along the lines of: "An Investigation of the Relationship Between Cold Air and Contraction". In
most scientific experiments there has to be some sort of purpose or goal behind it, and we call
this our "aim". In this case the aim is to examine the effect of air temperature on the size of the
balloon. Next up we have our hypothesis, and the hypothesis is an educated guess about what you
think will happen in this experiment. I use the word "educated" because hopefully you've learnt
something about some aspects of this experiment in class already. So for example in this experiment,
you might have learnt that heating things up expands things and cooling things down contracts
things, so we're going to use that information to create our hypothesis. In this case that
could go something like, "the balloon that's at room temperature, which we call the control,
will stay the same while the balloon that's cooled down will contract". A "control" in any experiment
is basically something that stays the same. It provides a baseline to compare your results to.
Now we're going into what's called the "method" part of the report, and we're going to start by
listing the materials that we'll need. You want to be really specific in this part of the report,
especially when it comes to using different sizes of things. So if you're using different
size beakers, actually specify what size of beaker it is: whether it's a 500 ml beaker
or a 250 ml beaker. If using different weights of things, say how heavy it is - whether it's
a two kilogram weight or a five kilogram weight. And also list the quantities of
things as well. In your "procedure" section you basically write a step by step recipe that uses
all of the materials that you've mentioned in the materials section, so that anyone can pick up your
report and replicate your experiment perfectly without having seen it before. In this example,
we'll measure the circumferences of each of the balloons and we'll put one of them in the fridge,
and after 24 hours we'll take it out of the fridge we'll measure the circumferences again. We can
compare whether the one that was in the fridge has shrunk in size any more than what would normally
shrink in anyway. There are a couple of ways that you can represent your results in your "results"
section. You can have "qualitative" data, which is when you're using words to describe what happened
like the colour of something how something looks or sounds or feels. You can also have
"quantitative" data, which is using numbers and the units of measurement like seconds, kilograms,
centimeters, and you can then use that data to create graphs and tables. So qualitative
data is describing what happened using words and sentences, and quantitative data is representing
your results as numbers. Because I've measured the sizes of the balloons and I'm representing
that as a percentage to allow comparison between the two balloons, I'm using quantitative data. I
could simply describe the balloons and say that the one in the fridge is a lot smaller
than the one that wasn't in the fridge, but that's nowhere near as precise as actually
being able to use measurements to compare the two sizes. In your "discussion" section,
guess what? You 'discuss' your results! You try and link the theories and the concepts you've
learnt in class to explain what you observed in your experiment, and in high school that usually
involves answering questions that are designed to get you thinking about this structure and to get
you linking the concepts in class with what you've observed. This varies from teacher to teacher,
but sometimes in your discussion you can talk about the limitations in your experiments. So,
what are some things that might have affected your results and how could you overcome those
in the future? You may also want to discuss some ways you can improve the experiment as a whole, so
how could you do things more efficiently, or how can you do things differently, or use different
equipment to try and get more accurate results. Lastly, we have our "conclusion", and with my
students I generally expect them to re-state what the aim was and say whether that was achieved and
why, and also restate what their hypothesis was - what they expected to happen - and whether that
actually happened and why. Sometimes only part of the hypothesis is supported, and so then you can
say "the hypothesis - which was blah blah blah - was partially supported", and then you would go on
to elaborate why that's the case. You can also try and come up with implications of your findings:
so try and link your results with the real world and why is this information that we've
learnt through this experiment is useful to us in a real life scenario. So that's it! We've
gone through the main sections of a scientific report: the title, aim, hypothesis, materials,
procedure, results, discussion and conclusion. This is usually what I expect from my students
at my school, and this video is really just designed to give you an overall guide. Your
teacher might have a slightly different way of doing things, and that's fine, but just double
check a few things with them if you're not sure. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!