Documenting Your Work
Project Notebook Every scientist worth his salt keeps detailed notes on each project on which he works. You should do likewise. This notebook, which could as well be a set of file cards, contains a running, day-by-day account of everything that concerns the project—observations, speculations, experiments, materials, expenses, procedures, data and observations, hypotheses, checks for validity, conclusions, and conjectures. From such notebooks comes the information for the scientist’s formal report, or “paper”, by which he advises his employers and colleagues of the progress of his work.
Since the notebook contains everything pertaining to your project, it may become disarranged, no matter how well you organize it in the beginning. If so, don’t worry—just keep it up to date.
Project Report But there should be nothing haphazard about the final report on your project. In some science fairs, this report is displayed in the exhibit and considered in the judging. Even where not required, the project report belongs with your exhibit.
After writing your report you will find that much of your exhibit planning—and even some of the text which will appear in your exhibit—is already accomplished.
If you are doing your project as a classroom assignment, your teacher may specify the manner in which your report is to be organized. Otherwise, you can follow a format such as this:
1. TITLE. Keep it short. If accuracy requires more than a few words, consider using a very brief main title and a more definitive subtitle.
2. ABSTRACT. This is a very brief condensation of the entire report summarizing the objectives of the project, what you did, and the conclusions you came to.
3. INTRODUCTION. Describe your topic and give some background information such as relevant work done by others. Summarize your purpose, scope, and method of investigation. State the questions or hypotheses your examined. Include the most significant findings of your investigations.
4. MATERIALS AND METHODS. Describe in detail the materials, equipment, methods, experiments, controls, unforeseen difficulties and remedies.
5. OBSERVATIONS AND DATA. Describe your observations. Include some of your observational data here as an example. You may wish to put the bulk of it in an appendix.
6. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS. Give the main conclusions your observations tend to prove or deny. (Disproval of your initial hypothesis may be as important as proof of it!) Include the evidence developed for each main conclusion and any exceptions, or for opposing theories. Offer possible explanations. Compare your results and interpretations with those of other workers in the same field.
7. NEW QUESTIONS, POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS, AND FUTURE PROJECTS, IF ANY.
8. APPENDIX. Give more detailed and supplementary information, often including graphs, tables, photographs, and drawings.
9. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Keep it brief, listing only those books and periodicals which you actually used to provide background information.
10. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. Both prudence and the best traditions of science require that you acknowledge all help which you receive. Usually student scientists do not produce laboratory work of professional quality, nor do student exhibitors match the skill of commercial designers and fabricators. Consequently, when judges encounter very exceptional unacknowledged work, they may reasonably wonder if the exhibitor received some professional help. And if on part, they speculate, on how much more? Result: they might be tempted to disqualify the exhibit entirely, whereas if you had acknowledged frankly—“Professor James Smith, Alpha University, for loan of four color transparencies”, or “My father, who devised the lighting system”—you might lose a point or two on their scorecards, but remain in competition.
Your project notebook and your formal project report are important components of your exhibit to follow. If both are completed first, you will find planning the rest of your exhibit a much simpler task.