Example of a well-written lab report. Return to Laboratory report Instruction main page Example of a poorly written lab report (single-spaced to conserve paper; yours should be double-spaced to leave room for comments) Ontogenetic Color Change and Mating Cues in Largus californicus (Hemiptera: Largidae). Carey Booth Box Biology 2 February Lab instructor: Ned Knight Lab day: Friday While training to be a scientist, it is important to know how to write a lab procedure and to be able to write effectively so that the details of your experiment can be explained clearly and explicitly. Throughout your time at Marywood, you’ll be asked to prepare laboratory Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins How to Write a Lab Report Scientific writing is different from other types of writing. You are used to writing essays and papers in certain ways like critical responses or personal essays, but we write differently in the sciences. Scientific writing is always in the past tense and is written in the third person. For example, the following sentences are not written correctly in scientific
How to Write a Scientific Laboratory Report | Marywood University
Published on May 20, by Pritha Bhandari. A lab report conveys the aim, methods, results, and conclusions of a scientific experiment.
The main purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method by performing and evaluating a hands-on lab experiment.
This type of assignment is usually shorter than a research paper. Lab reports are commonly used in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics STEM fields. This article focuses on how to structure and write a lab report. Table of contents Structuring a lab report Title Abstract Introduction Method Results Discussion Conclusion Frequently asked questions about lab reports.
The sections of a lab report can vary between scientific fields and course requirements, but writing laboratory reports usually contain the purpose, methods, and findings of a lab experiment. Although most lab reports contain these sections, some sections can be omitted or combined with others, writing laboratory reports.
For example, some lab reports contain a brief section on research aims instead of an introduction, and a separate conclusion is not always required, writing laboratory reports. Create a title that directly conveys the main focus or purpose of your study. See an example. An abstract condenses a lab report into a brief overview of about — words. It should provide readers with a compact version of the research aims, the methods and materials used, the main results, and the final conclusion.
Think of it as a way of giving readers a preview of your full lab report. Nitrogen is a necessary nutrient for high quality plants. Tomatoes, one of the most consumed fruits worldwide, rely on nitrogen for healthy leaves and stems to grow fruit. This experiment tested whether nitrogen levels affected tomato plant height in a controlled setting.
It was expected that higher levels of nitrogen fertilizer would yield taller tomato plants. Levels of nitrogen fertilizer were varied between three groups of tomato plants. The control group writing laboratory reports not receive any nitrogen fertilizer, while one experimental group received low levels of nitrogen fertilizer, and a second experimental group received high levels of nitrogen fertilizer. All plants were grown from seeds, writing laboratory reports, and heights were measured 50 days into the experiment.
The effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were tested between groups using an ANOVA, writing laboratory reports. The plants with the highest level of nitrogen fertilizer were the tallest, while the plants with low writing laboratory reports of nitrogen exceeded the control group plants in height.
In line with expectations and previous findings, the effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were writing laboratory reports significant. This study strengthens the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants. Your lab report introduction should set the scene for your experiment. One way to write your introduction is with a funnel an inverted triangle structure:. Describe relevant previous research on your topic and note how your study may confirm it or expand it, or fill a gap in the research field.
This lab experiment builds on previous research from Haque, Paul, and Sarkerwho demonstrated that tomato plant yield increased at higher levels of nitrogen. However, the present research focuses on plant height as a growth indicator and uses a lab-controlled setting instead. State your main research aims and expectations by outlining your hypotheses. Based on the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants, the primary hypothesis was that the plants with the high levels of nitrogen would grow the tallest.
The secondary hypothesis was that plants with low levels of nitrogen would grow taller than plants with no nitrogen. A lab report Method section details the steps you took to gather and analyze data. Give enough detail so that others can follow or evaluate your procedures.
Write this section in the past tense. If you need to include any long lists of procedural steps or materials, place them in the Appendices section but refer to them in the text here. You should describe your experimental design, your subjects, writing laboratory reports, materials, and specific procedures used for data collection and analysis.
Briefly note whether your experiment is a within-subjects or between-subjects design, and describe how your sample units were assigned to conditions if relevant. A between-subjects design with three groups of tomato plants was used. The control group did not receive any nitrogen fertilizer. The first experimental group received a low level of nitrogen fertilizer, while the second experimental group writing laboratory reports a high level of nitrogen fertilizer.
Describe human subjects in terms of demographic characteristics, and animal or plant subjects in terms of genetic background. Note the total number of subjects writing laboratory reports well as the number of subjects per condition or per group.
You should also state how you recruited subjects for your study. List the equipment or materials you used to gather data and state the model names for any specialized equipment.
Describe your experimental settings and conditions in detail. You can provide labelled diagrams or images of the exact set-up necessary for experimental equipment. State how extraneous variables were controlled through restriction or by fixing them at a certain level e. Light levels were fixed throughout the experiment, and the plants were writing laboratory reports to 12 hours of light a day. The pH and carbon levels of the soil were also held constant throughout the experiment as these variables could influence plant height.
The plants were grown in rooms free of insects or other pests, and they were spaced out adequately. Your experimental procedure should describe the exact steps you took to gather data in chronological order. Place detailed information in the appendices where appropriate.
Some instructors will allow you to simply reference the manual and state whether you changed any steps based on practical considerations. Other instructors may want you to rewrite the lab manual procedures as complete sentences in coherent paragraphs, while noting any changes to the steps that you applied in practice, writing laboratory reports. First, tomato seeds were sown in wooden flats containing soil writing laboratory reports 2 cm below the surface.
Each seed was kept cm apart. The flats were covered to keep the soil moist until germination, writing laboratory reports. The seedlings were removed and transplanted to pots 8 days later, writing laboratory reports, with a maximum of 2 plants to a pot. Each pot was watered once a day to keep the soil moist. The nitrogen fertilizer treatment was applied to the plant pots 12 days after transplantation.
The control group received no treatment, while the first experimental group received a low concentration, and the second experimental group received a high concentration. There were 5 pots in each group, and each plant pot was labelled to indicate the group the plants belonged to. A measuring tape was used to record the length of the writing laboratory reports from ground level to the top of the tallest leaf. In your results section, you should report the results of any statistical analysis procedures that you undertook, writing laboratory reports.
You should clearly state how the results of statistical tests support or refute your initial hypotheses, writing laboratory reports. The mean heights of the plants in the control group, low nitrogen group, and high nitrogen groups were A one-way ANOVA was applied to calculate the effect of nitrogen fertilizer level on writing laboratory reports height.
Next, post-hoc tests writing laboratory reports performed writing laboratory reports assess the primary and secondary hypotheses. In support of the primary hypothesis, the high nitrogen group plants were significantly taller than the low nitrogen group and the control group plants. Similarly, writing laboratory reports, the results supported the secondary hypothesis: the low nitrogen plants were taller than the writing laboratory reports group plants.
These results can be reported in the text or in tables and figures. Use text for highlighting a few key results, but present large sets of numbers in tables, or show relationships between variables with graphs.
You should also include sample calculations in writing laboratory reports Results section for complex experiments.
For each sample calculation, provide a brief description of what it does and use clear symbols. Present your raw data in the Appendices section and refer to it to highlight any outliers or trends. The Discussion section will help demonstrate your understanding of the experimental process and your critical thinking skills. Interpreting your results involves clarifying how your results help you answer your main research question. Report whether your results support your hypotheses.
When describing limitations, use specific examples. For example, if random error contributed substantially to the measurements in your study, writing laboratory reports, state the particular sources of error e, writing laboratory reports.
The results support the hypothesis that nitrogen levels affect plant height, with increasing levels producing taller plants.
These statistically significant results are taken together with previous research to support the importance of nitrogen as a nutrient for tomato plant growth. However, unlike previous studies, writing laboratory reports, this study focused on plant height as an indicator of plant growth in the present experiment.
Writing laboratory reports, plant height may not always reflect plant health or fruit yield, so measuring other indicators would have strengthened the study findings. Another limitation of the study is the plant height measurement technique, writing laboratory reports, as the measuring tape was not suitable for plants with extreme curvature.
Future studies may focus on measuring plant height in different ways. The main strengths of this study were the controls for extraneous variables, such as pH and carbon levels of the soil.
All other factors that could affect plant height were tightly controlled to isolate the effects of nitrogen levels, resulting in high internal validity for this study. Your conclusion should be the final section of your lab report. Some lab reports may omit a Conclusion section because it overlaps with the Discussion section, but you should check with your instructor before doing so.
Lab reports are commonly assigned in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics STEM fields. The purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method with a hands-on lab experiment. Course instructors will often provide you with an experimental design and procedure.
Your task is to write up how you actually performed the experiment and evaluate the outcome. In contrast, a research paper requires you to independently develop an original argument. It involves more in-depth research and interpretation writing laboratory reports sources and data.
This Is What My College Engineering Lab Reports Looked Like
, time: 6:33How To Write A Lab Report | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples
While training to be a scientist, it is important to know how to write a lab procedure and to be able to write effectively so that the details of your experiment can be explained clearly and explicitly. Throughout your time at Marywood, you’ll be asked to prepare laboratory Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins For your chemistry laboratory reports, you should follow, by default, the ACS guidelines as outlined in The ACS Style Guide and Journal of the American Chemical Society, JACS (all examples given in this handout conform to JACS format). If your professor requires you to conform to a specific journal’s format, look at articles from that journal or refer to the journal’s “Instructions to Authors.” Writing a laboratory report is as important as taking data. When I say “writing,” that includes the careful analysis of data and attention to the details of how the information is formatted for the
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