As part of their investigations, the Year 12 students carried out practical work to investigate the effect of light intensity on the rate of photosynthesis in pond weed. They did this by counting the number of bubbles of oxygen gas produced in a fixed time and then calculating the amount of bubbles per minute.
Students then investigated which photosynthetic pigments were responsible for absorbing which wavelengths of light and we separated the pigments using paper chromatography to determine which was which.
Practical work such as this is vital in developing students’ scientific enquiry skills as well as teaching them a variety of new techniques which can be applied to other fields of science, not just Biology.