Writing your Assignment

· An informative title and headings for sections.

· A list of references (bibliography) at the back, with enough detail that someone else could find them. For instance if you used a website you would need to give the full web address and date used

· Keep your report clear, straightforward and concise.

More specifically, your report should be divided up into sections as follows:

· Aim

· Application

· Research

· Conclusion

· Underlying Physics

· References

Title of investigation: The title must be informative and appropriate for a formal science report

Aim: You must describe clearly what you are going to investigate, for instance ‘I am going to investigate how changing variable X will affect variable Y’

Application: Here you must provide a statement describing characteristics or features of your chosen application (what does it do, how does it work?) and then describe how this application benefits society or the environment (Why do we need to know about it?).

Research

Select relevant sources: This is a chance for you to justify why you have picked the resources you have to do your research. When selecting your sources you must mention at least two out of:

· Relevance of resources

· Reliability of source

· Similarity or difference in perspectives of chosen sources

Select relevant information from sources: Here you must include relevant data/information from AT LEAST 2 of your sources. You can collect information or data from experimental data, notes form a visit or talk, notes taken from a video or written texts/websites. You must present your notes IN YOUR OWN WORDS! If you copy things down directly from the source and do not credit the source your report may not be considered as this is not your own work.

Process and present data/information: There are 6 marks available here so there is a lot to fit in!

· You need to process data you have collected and/or information you have found through your research. ‘Processing’ means you can perform calculations, produce tables, plot graphs or summarise texts you have read in your own words. When you do this it must be made clear WHERE your original source material came from, be it experimental data or other sources. For instance you could draw a table to process data from an experiment and write a summary of the information you have collected.

· Presenting data-again information from 2 separate forms into summary, graph, table, chart or diagram. These must be detailed. For example, if you had done a table and a summary as mentioned in the ‘process’ part, you could use data from the table to plot a graph (if this is appropriate) and pick key points from the summary to make a flowchart etc.

· Make the most of these marks-make sure you have fully labelled any graphs, tables, charts or diagrams.

· Comparison of data from at least two sources

Conclusion: Here you must clearly state your conclusion and make sure that your conclusion is effectively answering what was ‘asked’ when you wrote your aim. Your conclusion MUST come from the evidence-you cannot make it up based on what you think is correct, even if it is not what you expected! You must take your conclusion from the data you have gathered.

Underlying Physics: In this section you are given a chance to explain in detail the ‘underlying Physics’ of your assignment task.

You may want to explain the underlying laws/formulas you have used, if you do this make sure you identify what the terms (symbols) mean and what their units are. The terms and ideas you want to talk about here should be things you have looked at in class or studied so take this chance to show off your knowledge here!

References: This a bit like a bibliography-you have to include a note of all of the sources of information you used, using exact titles of books, publisher and year, possibly even page numbers if this is relevant. If you used an experiment as a source you must give the title of the experiment and its aim.