Nowadays high schools emphasize on research project work for almost all subjects. These projects are compulsory and are assessed for topic, content, research work, conclusion, reference work and most important of all is the overall presentation of the project in written format.
Student is often assigned topics by teachers and has very little option to change. The actual preparation must begin once the student gets the topic. The topic itself might appear confusing. But often the basic idea behind the topic is very simple. So first of all find the focus area of the work. This is easy in science projects. One needs to identify the process that needs to be followed. Research plan in advance helps one to keep focused. For example the project could be: Observing photosynthesis in plants. For this one needs to know, what is photosynthesis? What teacher expects the student to learn? What experiment can be done to actually observe the phenomena? How the experiment can be set up? What parameters can be measured? How to put together the data? What can be the conclusions and inferences drawn from the experiment?
Once the plan of the project is in place, one can proceed step by step to do the actual project. It is important to keep a record of very small things required in the project. Also make a note of environment when the experiment is actually done. The weather parameters like temperature, humidity, sunny day or cloudy day, and time must be recorded .Even though at the end not all of them will be of use but they are important factors for some science experiments.
Once experiment is done and relevant data is collected. Make a rough draft of how the project needs to be written. Never forget the focal point of the work. Keeping that in mind, work out the rough sketch. Science projects reports need not be descriptive but they need to be precise. No need to use flowery prose or poetry. Highlight the focus of the research topic. Then jot down the important methods, tools, experiment and data. Put down the final conclusion as well. Once the rough draft is ready, begin with final project write-up.
In the final project writing never drift away from the actual topic and the key words. Define in short what each keyword in the topic means. Understanding the topic and conveying that one has understood the topic are two different aspects. So here few lines on all key words help in putting across the basic idea of the project itself.
After brief description of the project move to the experimental part; the experimental setup, procedure and data collected. Final part is the conclusions drawn from the data and the result. At the end don’t forget to give a bibliography of the reference work. These citations even at high school level carry importance.
High school level projects generally aim at training young minds to do independent thinking, do research and come to a result. This learning method goes a long way in improving analytical abilities of the students. So the more an effort is sincere and honest, the more it helps in self-improvement.