Development Of Critical Thinking And Effective Presentation Of Ideas

Include all the results of your experiments and must have only results in it. Any interpretations of these results or attempts to relate them to the previous research you mentioned in your Introduction must be saved for the Discussion section. As well as these differences in structure between the essay and the lab report, there are also differences in style. A key criterion for scientific style, for example, is brevity.

Brevity is less important in the essay, in which you are encouraged to express ideas in an elaborate form. In a lab report you come closest to this more extended style of writing within the Discussion section. Here you are encouraged to question and to criticize. (Why did I get these results? How can I account for the differences between my results and those predicted by the theory? Are there weakness in the experimental design and methods? Etc.)

First – year students are often worried at being asked to criticize or evaluate the ideas and theories they read in books or learn in lectures. ‘I am only a student. How can I know whether this is better than that? How can I disagree with my lecturer? How I can I question the authority of a tex tbook?' Yet developing the capacity to make valid judgements is a major objective of higher education.

If a students writes an essay based merely on the notes he has taken in lectures or on the summary of the material in one book, the lecturer is likely to criticize him sharply: ‘All this comes from my lecture. I know this already. Use your brain, not mine, ‘or ‘This essay merely repeats Smith's article. I can read Smith more easily in print. What else have you read? What do you think ?'

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