Showing Your Discoveries

THIS IS LEGACY MATERIAL - the science is correct but the marks no longer apply!

Up to 8 marks are available for analysing results from your practical investigation. Here we start using scientific language to get 6 marks.

A.6a

First of all, averaging your results is considered a numerical method. This means that you can get this mark by doing some quality averaging! It is vital, therefore, that you get this right and don't overdo it:

On the other hand, teachers will normally expect a good quality graph - having correctly averaged your results will help you here!

Graphing

Proper graphs need to have:

• clear points
• straight or smooth lines of bestfit
• labelled axes, with units
• a title

Oddly lots of pupils don't bother with these pesky details, so don't get this mark. Useful for you. Let's see what our top pupil does to get 6a...

Nicely done! Just look how clear those points are, and how well the computer has drawn a straight line through the points! Talk about perfection: they've even put a title and labelled the axes! Shame about the horrid yellow background...

Excel Template

As you've seen, computers can do lots of the work for you. We've created a template to use in Excel when dealing with straight line graphs. Click here.

• A.6b - Using Scientific Lingo