Lab Notebook Guidelines
For advice on keeping
an accurate and informative lab notebook, see "The
purpose of laboratory and field notebooks" in Chapter 8, "Writing Laboratory
and Other Research Reports," of Pechenik's A Short Guide to Writing about
Biology, 4th ed.
For each experiment, your laboratory notebook should include the following
as appropriate:
1. statement of objectives
2. experimental design
3. observations and data
4. analysis and interpretation
5. summary statement, including future objectives
Be sure to date your lab noteboo and provide sufficeint detail that experiments can be repeated and that we can locate tubes that contain materials (such as plasmid DNA) that we may need to pursue your observations.
Grading rubric for Lab Notebook
A 0-2 scale will be used to evaluate each attribute of teh Lab notebook listed below. A 0 means not done well at all. a 1 means done well sometimes but not consistently or missing some significant portion throughout, and a 2 means done well.
1. Are the pages dated consistently?
2. Are methods and materials clearly explained such that we can repeat experiments? (this includes support materials such as DNA sequence information that illustrates what you might be cutting or amplifying by PCR)
3. Are experiments clearly explained? (materials and methods used, controls set up, etc)
4. Are results from experiments clearly explained? (did the digest work, are controls identified, data analysis (in case of kinetics))
5. Is the text and lab notebook neat and clearly organized?
The lab notebook will be graded twice, once after the molecular portion and once after the biochemical portion.