Recording and presenting results
Chemistry · Key Stage 2 · The School
The table comes first
Draw the table BEFORE the experiment, with a column for the thing you change and a column for the thing you measure, each headed with its unit. Doing it first forces you to decide what you are measuring, and it stops results being scribbled on a corner of the page and lost. Repeats get their own columns, with a mean at the end.
Which chart
A BAR CHART compares separate groups — which towel, which surface, which material. A LINE GRAPH shows how one measurement changes as another changes continuously — temperature over time, distance as force increases. Using a line graph for separate groups draws a line between things that have no in-between, which is meaningless and looks convincing.
Reading your own results
A pattern is a sentence: "as the ramp got steeper, the car travelled further." Look for direction first — does it go up, down, or stay level? Then look for anything that breaks the pattern, and say so rather than smoothing it away. An odd result is either a mistake worth finding or a discovery worth checking again.
Imagine a class rolls a toy car down a ramp made with 1, 2 or 3 books. These numbers are made up to show the method. Their table was drawn first, so every try had a box ready. For 1 book, the three tries are 37, 41 and 42 cm. Add them to get 120. Divide by 3, the number of tries, to get a mean of 40 cm. For 2 books the tries are 64, 67 and 73, so the mean is 68 cm. For 3 books they are 90, 96 and 99, so the mean is 95 cm. The pattern is that as the ramp got steeper, the car travelled further. It went furthest from 3 books. The website Science Sparks reports the same pattern with real toy cars.