Vandreg

Everything you said is quite interesting and I will consider it, but conversation has moved into slightly wrong direction. My students do have a motivation already, but I think I shoud build some set of rules for them to make it clear how often and when they must work. Like "come to lab three days a week" or "get a task in monday and make a report in saturday". But I am not sure in what way I should organize it.

They are aware about possible results and their work is really exciting. This is not something like just measuring numbers and building plots, they run experiments using magneto-optical techniques (even involving liquid nitrogen!) and get amazing videos with hipnotizing complex domains behavior. In some cases there are even changes in color due to magnetical phenomena. Sure, they have to measure some parameters and build some plots, but this is not just numbers, they can see what is really happening. Sometimes we have to invent approaches to measurements and think about new parameters, like how to describe domains shape with numbers. Such experimental work is too difficult to do it alone, so they work in groups, but mostly not with each other. There must be at least one laboratory staff member to watch over equipment. Two people is enough for this work, so usually each student works in a pair either with me or with one of my collegues. Work is inevitably repeated but it seems to me that it is hard to call their working process a boring thing. At the same time, it takes a lot of effort and they do have some responsibility for what they do, so I think they might be afraid of all this complexity and huge amount of things they have to understand clearly. However, I teach them to important things bit by bit. You mean I should think about some kind of bonuses for good work? Grades would just add a headache for all of us. The only thing comes to my mind is to give them cookies.

Hello everyone. I attend a course of seminars called "English for scientists" and I have a homework to ask some question on your nice forum. So I hope you'll help me to kill two bunnies with one shot by solving a problem and executing a task. Now, to the question. I supervise scientific work of a couple of 4th year students and they are not very willing to spend their whole days in laboratory like me and my collegues. They sure are able to handle with great amounts of work when they feel it is necessary, but mostly they manage to find good excuses to not attend laboratory, which results into reducing quality of their researches. What can I do to make my students work in a lab on a regular basis without forcing them to it? How often in your opinion they should attend lab and for how long they should stay? Maybe I should give them tasks with deadlines? By the way, we deal with magnetic domain structure in crystals. If you notice some mistakes in my English, I'd be glad if you'd point on them.