Traditionally (in most of the undergraduates colleges that I know of in Delhi), students have to record their experiments in a rather ornate fashion. They are usually expected to write detailed theory behind the experiments, which very often run in to pages, draw beautiful drawings (more is considered merrier at times). In certain disciplines, fat lab notebooks are prepared where students are supposed to be drawing diagrams of the specimen shown to them. The specimen could range from animals, plants, parts of anatomy etc. The diagrams should be well drawn, well labeled and should accompany with a list of all the features that are attributed to them (all this is reproduced mostly from the books with little inputs from the students). This practice is going on for as long as I can recollect. Now a days, smart kids paste pictures/​photocopies too. Am not sure if that is acceptable to all the teachers and whether such short routes help the students gain good grades!

Ask students: Do you enjoy doing experiments during the practical classes and their reply is in affirmation. Ask another one: Do you like writing practical notebooks and their eyes roll! Let us see why they find it to be a humungous task and assess what could be done to make it more interesting and useful.

Learning to record the procedure and findings of an experiment done in the class is very important. So is writing down discussion of the results and inferences. How important is it to make a separate, decorated notebook carrying lot of redundant information? That is the question being addressed here. What if the students jot down the details of the experiments in their class notebook (this is practiced in some institutions). Why do we make our students spend long hours in doing something which is not only insipid in nature but also does not contribute much in their growth (though some may argue that it does). Most often, it is found that a few students make the efforts to write and the rest of the students borrow from them and copy their text…yes many do COPY, with no hesitation whatsoever! They are not even aware that copying from each other (even if the experiment was done in a group, even if their work is not being published) is not a healthy practice. Also, writing texts from the books verbatim without acknowledging the reference source is akin to plagiarism, even if the fate of these notebooks is the trash bin! 

In all these years of observing students, many of us (faculty members) have inferred:

1. Preparation of fat, decorated, elaborate practical record books by the students is totally a redundant exercise. Most of the students do it mechanically and learn very little from it.

2. Even the disciplined students resort to copying from the previous years’ notebook if they can have an access to those.

3. Students spend a lot of their time and energy in the preparation of such records (writing 30 – 40 experiments in each semester, that too with much fanfare, is indeed a herculean task), which could be put to more productive and intellectually stimulating work.

My suggestion is to trim the frills.

1.We should make concerted efforts to reduce workload of students who take up science courses and give them more time for ​‘thinking’ (this is important for all the students but right now we are focusing on science students). They seem to slog the most amongst the college students. Doing away with preparation of elaborate practical notebooks could be a step in this direction.

2. How to write an experiment should itself be an independent exercise, to be included in all the subjects. It is absolutely essential for students to learn methodical recording of an experiment and discuss the results in their own language. This would also encourage/​necessitate original thinking and writing. Some students do have difficulty in expressing their thoughts because of not being proficient in the language but with practice, they learn (there is anyway no escape from this in the long run, sooner they learn, better for them). And since students will be writing in the classroom itself, they could benefit from the presence of the teacher and get help.

3. For every experiment done, the necessary details should be recorded in the class notebook itself ((without the need of fancy drawings, lengthy theories, colored markings etc) and verified by the teacher. Emphasis should be laid on them learning how to analyze data and interpret results, observe the Do’s and Don’ts of the experiments etc.

4. Last but not the least, by dispensing with this practice; we could also show a kind gesture to the trees. Imagine the pile of such paper notebooks (and imagine their end use too), taking in to account the number of students, the subjects, semesters, departments and colleges…year after year after years. It will be an astronomical figure!