Guidelines for lab notebooks (MCB 130L):

General

The purpose of any laboratory notebook is to keep a thorough record of your observations, experiences, and thought process.  Keeping a good notebook is a key component of your grade in MCB 130L, since it may determine if you can receive an A for the course.  More importantly, maintaining a thorough and up-to-date notebook is the best way to ensure that you get the maximum benefit and enjoyment that you can from this course, and to minimize stress while in lab.  The notebook should be legible but is not expected to be a letter-perfect, pristine document - the goal is to record your personal experience in the lab, which sometimes involves hurriedly scrawling down something you’ve just seen before you go back to the microscope or the bench.  That’s okay!  Do not erase, white out, or scratch out errors.  Likewise, you should not need to rip out or add pages. You should cross out errors with a single line, so that you can still read them.  Try to include a comment on what went wrong and whether the experiment was repeated.  It’s absolutely fine if you want to change your mind about something, but you should maintain a record of how and why you changed your mind.  Comments should be written in your own words, in such a way that you or others could understand them long after you finish this course.  They do not need to be verbose or profound, but they should be clear.

            Your GSI will check that you have completed the Prelab before the lab period begins, and may periodically check, initial, and date specific sections to help ensure that you keep up. Each of the three course instructors will also grade your notebook at some point during the semester.  This can happen at any point during the instructor’s section of the course.  If the instructor requests your notebook for grading, you must have it with you and it must be up to date – no excuses!  Instructors will make every effort to return notebooks by your next lab period.  Grades will be based on clarity, completeness, creativity, and evidence of independent observation and analysis.

Your notebook should adhere to the following guidelines:

• It must be a BOUND notebook with preprinted page numbers.  Loose-leaf or spiral-bound notebooks will not be accepted.
• Everything must be written in ink, not in pencil.
• No white-out (e.g. Liquid Paper) should be used.
• Prelabs must be completed BEFORE the laboratory period.
• The first page(s) should contain an index of the notebook’s contents, which you should update as the semester progresses.
• Every page or section must be dated with the date you WROTE it (not the date you were supposed to write it).
• Attachments such as images, spectra, print-outs, or other information that is not directly entered into the notebook may be taped or pasted in neatly, but NOT stapled.  The date of entry should be written next to (or on top of) the attachment, along with any relevant details about how the data were collected (e.g. microscope settings, exposure time).  We would prefer that you do not include large pieces of paper that have to be folded to fit inside – if you have a large montage that will not fit on one notebook page, cut it into pieces and paste them in neatly.

Guidelines for Specific Sections

Prelab

The purpose of the Prelab is for you to read the procedures thoroughly before the class and to understand them well enough to rewrite them in your own easy-to-read-and-follow format.  This should make it simpler for you to carry out the procedure without errors, since you’re already familiar with it.  This familiarity should free your mind from struggling to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing and enable you to contemplate what you’re actually observing.  The Prelab should be sufficiently detailed so that you (or someone else) could replicate your experiment.  As you perform the procedure, your outline should be annotated with any mistakes or deviations that occur from what you intended to do, as well as any clarifications that will help you remember what you did.  Of course, the initial outline should be done before the lab, hence the term “Prelab.”  It’s acceptable to do this on a computer and paste/tape it in if you find this easier than writing by hand.  Try not to just copy from the lab manual, but to organize the information in a way that you will find easy to follow.

Results

This section should be a thorough description of your observations in the course of carrying out the experiment.  Ideally, you write at least a good chunk of this while doing the experiment or immediately afterwards, while it is still fresh in your mind (not two weeks later, when Spring Break has made it all seem vague and fuzzy).  Images or other data should be taped in, not stapled.  Data should always be clearly labeled – with a TITLE and a LEGEND that enable you or someone else to understand what’s what.  For microscope images that usually means you should have a color key (if the images are in color) and a label indicating the conditions that were used for each picture.  For example, this might include such information as the objective lens and fluorescence filters you used.  If you are including data from other students in the class, you should attribute it appropriately.  The most convenient and natural way to organize this is to intersperse the images or other data with your notes describing your observations so that you don’t have to keep flipping pages back and forth to see what you wrote about each image.

Discussion and Analysis

This is the place to summarize and review your results as a whole, and to comment about what they allow you to conclude and perhaps how they fit it with what you know about the experiment from other sources.  A good approach for a laboratory course might be to state your expectations about the results that different conditions should yield, and compare those expectations to your actual observations.  In general it is very helpful if you can make a clear distinction between what you see and what you know.  If you can compare what you see to what you expected to see based on prior knowledge (from class lectures, publications you’ve read, etc.) that’s great!  Also, the questions at the end of the lab exercises can provide a good guide for the discussion and analysis section, so make sure that this section contains the answers to the questions.

 

This web site is updated by Tim Melton Site modified on Jan 2005.