E10 Group Report

This report is on experiment 5 from E10 “Enthalpy of reaction: sodium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid”:

  • The report is written completely online with each member of the group adding their own result and contributing to the completion of the various sections of the report. No face to face group work is needed.
  • The report is designed to be concise and for students to learn how to write formal, structured reports. The instructions for the students suggest a maximum of 2 pages.
  • For each session, your group of 18 (or so) students has been divided up into two groups of 9 (or so) students. When a student pulls up the report online, they automatically receive the latest version of their group’s report and a list of the members of the group.

You should therefore receive 18 (or so) reports but these will be in two identical sets of 9. You should therefore only have 2 reports to actually mark which you should be able to do in the normal laboratory session.

  • The marking criteria, copied from the self assessment section of the students’ information page are given overleaf. Each report is marked out of 2.
  • For each student, put your mark in the “Self Assessment” section of on their report along with a brief comment if necessary. If you add corrections or comments to a report, put them on one report and photocopy for the group.
  • If the students make mistakes (include spelling and grammar), please point them out and correct them. The students will learn very little if they simply receive full marks.

Make sure you should include your mark for each student in the book!

General instructions to the students

Each group's report should:

  1. Include all of the sections detailed in the 'Structure of a Laboratory Report' tab, (an appendix is not needed).
  2. Follow the style guide, including:
  3. the use of complete, grammatically correct sentences,
  4. the use of the past tense and third person and
  5. the inclusion of units for all measurements, with appropriate formatting
  6. A 'Results' section which includes a table containing the results of each member of the group by name.
  7. A short 'Conclusions' section which includes a comparison of the experimental value for the molar heat of neutralization from the experiment with a value from a reference and brief discussion of the experimental accuracy
  8. The inclusion of appropriately formatted references

Assessment Criteria

  • Each of the 4 criteria should be marked out of 0.5 to give a mark out of 2. Round up your final mark to the nearest 0.5 (i.e. 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2).
  • If a student hands a report in a week late, half the mark.
  • If a student does not hand a report in or it is later than a week late, they should get a zero.

1. The report has the correct structure and includes a title and each of following 7 subheadings: 'Abstract', 'Introduction', 'Method', 'Results', 'Discussion', 'Conclusions' and 'References'.

2. The Results section contains a table with your result and an average value for the group

3. The 'Conclusions' section contains a comparison with the experimental heat of neutralization with a value from a reference[1].

4. Appropriately formatted references have been included, with a reference to the 'Laboratory Handbook' and a reference to the source of the experimental heat of neutralization.

[1] The literature value is -57.3 kJ mol-1. Acceptable references include web sources such as Wikipedia if properly referenced.