Academic Biology



Accelerated Biology

Miss Dooley

Formal Lab Reports

In the scientific community, scientists often present their findings to their peers in a scientific journal or by publishing reports. Part of learning about what science is and how to engage in the process will be to gain experience in presenting the findings to your own work in a similar fashion. In those instances when you will be required to write a formal lab, it will be expected that they will be hand-written or typed and conform to the following format.

Heading: This section includes your name, the date the lab was performed, and a title. Titles are important. They tell your reader what you looked at and the effect that you were testing. Your title should reflect this information.

Introduction/Background: This section is designed to provide your reader with some information that will help to understand what the purpose of the experiment was and why certain materials or organisms were selected for use in the experiment. This section is NOT meant for you to list the definitions of terms or talk about your procedure. Here you might want to provide some of the important terms, necessary to understand the meat of your report, some information on species you may have used, and relevant chemical or mathematical equations. You should also include what questions will answered by your experiment.

Hypothesis: Here you should state your hypothesis. This should be in “if…then…” form.

Materials and Procedures If you followed a written procedure, you DO NOT need to repeat the information from the worksheet or other reference. In this case, you just need to note where the procedure you followed came from and any changes you may have made (ex: “the procedure provided in …was performed. The following changes …”). However, if you designed your own procedure, you MUST state exactly what you did. Procedures in scientific literature are written in the third person, past tense (ex: “water was boiled” NOT “I boiled the water” or “boil the water”). In this section you should include amounts, instruments, materials, and the type of data that you recorded. You may LIST your materials in bullets prior to describing your procedures OR include them in your narrative.

Data: In this section you will present all of your tables, graphs, measurements, observations, and illustrations. The worksheets provided do not always provide the best data tables, so feel free to present your findings in your own way. REMEMBER: Data tables are meant to be a tool for the reader to look at your data in an organized way. Keep this in mind when you decide how you want to present your data. As a general guideline: numerical data should be presented in a graph AND table. Notice that graphs are a way to interpret data, so think carefully about the type of graph and appropriate scale you want to use. All of your tables should be numbered and titled (ex: “Table 1. Comparison of evergreen and deciduous leave”), as well as your graphs (ex: “Figure 1. The effect of carbon dioxide on the rate of photosynthesis”). This is also the place where you will list formulas, calculations, and the results of your calculations. You may also include drawings you may have made during your observations. DO NOT re-do your drawings. Instead, cut and paste them in your report. This is a much more accurate method.

**DO NOT DISCUSS OR EXPLAIN YOUR DATA IN THIS SECTION!!!!**

Discussion: This is the part of the report where you explain what everything means. This is the meat and potatoes – put thought into it. In step-by-step detail, describe your data in words (ex: “Graph 2 shows that the temperature rose from a value of 10 degrees C to 50 degrees C in 20 minutes). The goal is not to tell about every data point, but to explain important trends, patterns, and noticeable findings. Once you have described the data, explain what it means (ex: “Graph 1 is an example of an exothermic reaction. This means that…). You should analyze why it is that you got the results that you did and what general principle(s) is being demonstrated in this experiment. If there is any data that does not fit in with your general conclusions, point it out and explain why and what it means. Lastly, you should tell how your findings answered or did not answer you hypothesis and overall purpose.

Error Analysis: Experiments are not without error. Sometimes human mistakes can be made, equipment may be faulty, or errors in procedure can occur. These may lead to results that do not meet your expectation. You should talk about these sources of error in this section and suggest any changes you might make if you were to repeat this experiment.

Conclusion: Your conclusion should be a short summation of what you learned in this experiment. Make sure your conclusion refers to whether or not your hypothesis was proven true.

NOTES:

1. Spelling, neatness, and grammar DO count. Make sure you use your spell check and pay attention to your use of commonly mistaken words (ex: affect/effect). It is important that you learn to use your scientific vocabulary. Steer clear of “it” or “their” and use the proper term instead.

2. Plagiarism will NOT be tolerated. Formal lab reports are to be in your own words. The report and the ideas within are the work of the people whose names are on top of the page. I WILL check for plagiarism and enforce the plagiarism policies of the school. Lab reports are meant to be a place for you to analyze work you have done and express your ideas based on existing knowledge. They are not the place to show me your skills in copy and paste from a website you found on Google. If you DO include information you’ve learned from some extra research (which I certainly encourage), be sure to cite other people’s work in a footnote and works cited page.

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