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3. What should our report look like?
No two reports are alike, but all reports must have three basic sections. The first section will be a typed text outlining your decisions and supporting arguments/explanations. It will be written as a letter back to Newcastle County officials. This section must be no more than five pages single spaced. The names of your group members and the lab section number would appear on the header of page one. The text will contain references to key figures and tables cited in the second section - the appendix.
The second section, the appendix, will contain figures (maps, charts, pictures, photographs, drawings) and tables of data. Please note that figures and tables are restricted to these kinds of things - do not label five pages of text downloaded from a web site as "Figure 4." Figures and tables will be numbered (Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. and Table 1, Table 2, etc.) in the order that you refer to them in the text. Each figure/table will also have a brief caption. A caption is a sentence or two that explains the figure or table. All pages in the appendix must be referred to in the written text. All pages in the appendix must have a citation on them. A citation describes where the information came from. Several examples of how to cite figures and tables in the text of your report are shown below. Examples of how to write a caption and citation on a figure and a table from a prior portfolio for your appendix are shown at the back of this document.
"Figure 2 is a map of earthquake activity in the eastern Unites States (URL http://www.blah.blah.blah). Based upon the evidence in Figure 2, it appears that Delaware is..."
"Table 3 lists all the earthquakes that have occurred in the Delaware region over the last 40 years by year and Richter scale magnitude (URL http://www.blah.blah.blah). As can be seen in Table 3, Delaware has experienced ..."
The third section of the report will be a bibliography - the titles and URL's of the Web sites you cite in your report , the labs you include, and the books and scientific reports you use. Note that the above examples of citing figures and tables in the text have footnotes to save space in the text. However, footnotes in the text would not replace your bibliography of citations in section three.
If you examine the criteria for scoring the report (page 8), you'll see that the arguments you construct (the content of your portfolio) is 60% of your report grade, and style/form is 40%. Style and form aid in the communication of content, but do not create it. Use the criteria for style/form to improve your ability to communicate what you know and understand, but do not take them to suggest that you must spend money producing bound reports loaded with color images.
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