lab report examples

lab report examples

The Importance of Lab Reports in Academic and Professional Settings

1. Introduction to Lab Reports

Lab reports are a formal method of communicating experimental findings. Students are requested to write lab reports for technical courses, as well as for laboratory courses. Properly written lab reports present findings, discuss results, and propose possible improvements in a clear and cohesive manner. As such, lab reports differ significantly from other types of writing typically prepared by students – not only in presentation, but also in the types of information, data, and results they convey. Although lab reports are an important part of both technical and laboratory courses, this type of writing is rarely discussed in technical writing publications. The genre is not given its due, I believe, because, although some characteristics of lab reports are familiar to writers who write other types of technical communications, lab reports are unique to the fields of study that typically use them.

2. Key Components of a Lab Report

Title: The title should provide for the audience the potential importance of the nature of the work. List of Authors: Self-explanatory. Date of Submission: Self-explanatory. Introduction/Background: The introduction is meant to provide the reader with why the work is important. It should also give a summary of the prior art. In other words, the introduction answers three questions. 1. What is the importance of the subject matter? 2. Why is information on the subject unknown in your specific case, relevant to the greater population of students taking this course? 3. What is the minimal important scientific information needed to understand the results of your experiment? The structures of introductions vary greatly. However, as far as presentations of information are concerned, the accurate answering of these three questions is crucial to every reader’s ability to follow the experiments. It is the very reason that citations occur in scientific works. Without citations, we do not offer our reader any way to parse knowledge.

Rather than providing a manuscript, the key components of a lab report are described. These elements provide the structure of a good report. A brief discussion is also provided at the end of each component because the importance of each part is not always obvious in the report that arises from the fulfillment of an assignment.

3. Types of Lab Reports and Their Formats

Formats for Lab Reports Prior to writing a research report, the following basic structure must be understood. A good report will be noted if it describes the accuracies and errors of the study concise details of the described materials, the earlier study’s thesis, and all that can be deduced from the report. Generally, a report generally has the following.

(c) Formal Lab Reports Formal lab reports are normally written for publication in journals and for the award of research degree. The typical these reports that are written meticulously are always lengthy.

(b) Computer-Generated Lab Reports An increasing number of faculty members are using the microcomputer to teach their students, as both acquisition and use of microcomputers by students and faculty members show significant growth in higher education. Students capture data from laboratory equipment and analyze, print, and graph it. The data and analysis table are surely inserted in the report and the conclusion drawn from the analysis are provided. Then, the faculty member reads the exact entries written by the students on the screen. The report can express the level of understanding of the student in it.

(a) Informal or Synthesized Lab Reports Informal reports can be derived from laboratory research carried out in the form of informal session notes. Note-taking is basically on the side effects of the research carried out and, at times, decides to miss crucial details. However, the criticism that can be drawn from a well-prepared improvised report cannot be underrated. For the report to warrant the attention of the audience, it should be sufficiently direct, reliable, and synthesize ideas and ensure that an understanding of the readers is established. Grading students based on their understanding, analysis, and synthesis of the results of an interaction, as opposed to note-taking, should be a shift towards drawing education faculty’s attention to note-taking.

Laboratory research reports are of various types and follow different formats and styles. However, based on the researchers’ discipline, be it linguistics or chemistry, lab reports can mainly be classified into three types, namely informal or synthesized lab reports, computer-generated lab reports, and formal lab reports.

4. Best Practices for Writing an Effective Lab Report

• Introduction The introduction states the purpose of the experiment and offers appropriate background, including relevant references.

• Abstract The purpose should include the objectives of the experiment. Typically, an in-depth analysis of two different equations should appear. Aims are very general – to plan, to reconsolidate knowledge that is already available, and to provide additional knowledge for future research. Your aims should be specific to the academic discipline or the scientific approach that you want to take.

• Title Your title should, in one sentence, illustrate the subject matter of your report and a key to your findings.

4. Best Practices for Writing an Effective Lab Report

• Ultimately, a well-written discussion explains the rationale behind each piece of data, the results in terms of your hypotheses, the insight offered by your study, and the importance and relevance of the data in relation to the issue you are investigating.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

The present study provides evidence for the importance of lab reports as a pedagogical tool in both the academic and professional settings. Bayesian ordinal cumulative link models were used to compare the effectiveness of lab reports relative to class discussions and returned homework assignments. When researchers compared the improvement in students’ scores from the first homework assignment to the last, they found that both class discussions and homework assignments were negatively related to those scores, which means that offering feedback to students suggests learning at a slower rate than when they are not given feedback. That is, after the initial period where we saw steady improvement, any subsequent offer of feedback is linked to a decline in the rate of improvement. Regarding the difference between the first and last homework submissions, the present study found that class discussions were superior to returned homework assignments in promoting learning while there was no significant difference between returned homework assignments and lab reports.