Introductory Biology at
Writing a Lab Report
This material appears in your lab manual.
A considerable part of your lab grade is determined
by your lab report. Your instructor may give you more
specific guidelines for writing your paper. You can get help with the clarity and correctness of your lab report at: The Writing Center Don't ask them to help you with the science. If you need help understanding the experiment you should go to the Tutoring Room or see your lab instructor. Science is a process that depends heavily on an exchange of information. Your lab report will be written in the same format that professional scientists use to report their research. Scientific writing is brief, concise, and specific. You can write an excellent report that includes all the necessary details in about 4 or 5 pages. Before you write your first draft, make sure you understand the experiment. Every lab report includes each of the following parts: Strategies For Starting the Report Know your audience. Write this report so it can be read by a UNCG freshman who has not taken Introductory Biology. That means you must explain what you did, and why, in terms that a typical high school graduate can understand. Define any scientific terminology you use. Dont assume your reader has read the lab manual or been to your class. Tell them what they need to know to understand your report. Provide enough detail that they could do their experiment, but eliminate unnecessary details. Try these steps to build your report:
Understanding Your Experiment The hardest part of understanding your experiment is knowing
A hypothesis is a statement that can be tested by conducting an experiment or collecting data. A hypothesis is sometimes described as an "educated guess", but it is really a specific prediction. A hypothesis can be proven false, but it is NEVER PROVEN TRUE! For example, suppose you want to study the effect of staying up late at night to cram for an exam. Does it help your grade, or hurt it? A simple hypothesis might be: "The amount of sleep a student gets the night before an exam will affect her score on the exam." But scientists always try to make their hypotheses as specific as they can. So, a better hypothesis would be: "The more sleep a student gets the night before an exam, the higher her score will be." This statement is testable. All we need are some good data on student sleep patterns and exam scores. We could test this hypothesis by performing an experiment, but it might be tough to find students who would be willing to risk making bad grades just to test our hypothesis. So instead, we can use a survey to collect the data, and see if the data support our hypothesis or refute it. A good hypothesis deals with the relationship between two variables. In this case, one variable is the amount of sleep a student gets, and one is the students grade on the exam. These two variables are expected to have a clear cause-and-effect relationship. We suspect that a lack of sleep will CAUSE the student's grade to be low. We call the grade the dependent variable because it DEPENDS on how much sleep a student gets. In any experiment, the scientist manipulates one variable to see how it affects the other variable. The one that the scientist manipulates is the independent variable, which causes changes in the dependent variable. When you look at a hypothesis, you should be able to quickly figure out which variable is independent and which is dependent. Your title should be about 8 to 12 words long, and it should mention both the independent and dependent variables. A bad title: "Exam Grades" The purpose of the Introduction section is to set the stage for your hypothesis. Your introduction should begin with background information that is general. Imagine that you are writing your introduction for a friend who has never had college biology. Give a clear explanation of what your study is all about, defining any specialized terms you use. Organize your introduction carefully; start off very broad, and then narrow down what you are talking about. For example, if you are writing about the effects of sleep on exam performance, you should start with the basics: why people need sleep, what happens during sleep, and what are some known results of a lack of sleep. In this part of the paper you will want to use information from various sources that you research in the library, and cite the sources correctly. Then, narrow down your introduction to the specific hypothesis you tested. Your Methods section is pretty easy to write if you are careful about a couple of things:
The Results section has two elements: a textual description of your results, and a graphical summary of your results.
Here is an example of a good graph (DO NOT add the labels shown in red; they are there just helpful notes): The Discussion section is the hardest one to write, but it is the most important. You cant write a good discussion until you have the rest of your report in good shape. Make sure your discussion answers all the following questions:
In your Literature Cited section, you must list every source you used in writing your report. The correct, general format is: Author, date, title, publication information. Some examples include: (from a paper in a journal): Somnolent, I.M. 1996. College student performance improves with increased sleep time. Journal of Sleep Behaviors 35:111-117. (from a chapter in a book): Repose, D. and S. Slumber. 1992. Sleep Patterns, Pp. 22-39 in Principles of Sleep, D. Repose et al, eds. San Francisco: Siesta Publishers. Other Tips:
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