An age-old problem of laboratory instruction is finding a
way to get students to prepare before coming to lab. Recently
one of the authors (MP) has advocated “free form
preparation”.The students may prepare their lab notebooks
in any way whatever, subject only to the constraint
that the lab manual not be brought into the room (1-4).
Potentially this idea is a simple solution to the nagging
problem of student preparation. However, there is still real
skepticism about this idea, which has been tried only at
the college level in very few courses. This paper will examine
what happens when this style of preparation is extended
to a high school lab.