Guidelines for Writing a Lab Report 
LAB REPORT GUIDELINES
Writing a good lab report is an important goal of your science education, and gives you the opportunity to enhance your writing skills and to communicate your understanding of the scientific process to others.
Your lab report for this semester will be a write up of your independent research project. This will follow the standard format for a lab report and should include the following sections:
Title
Introduction
Materials and Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
References
For this course we are giving extra emphasis to the materials and methods section. This section should include sufficient detail to allow others to reproduce your experiments, without being overly descriptive.
A guide to writing each section is as follows:
TITLE
Name the experiment.
The title should be descriptive of what you did or what your data showed. A reader should be able to obtain some understanding of the content of your report from the title. In the research world, scientists scan the table of contents of journals to determine if there are any papers relevant to their research that they should read. Therefore the title is important for getting your work recognized.
INTRODUCTION
Explain why you choose this project, and what you hoped to learn from it.
You will be required to research the background information for your project, and present the current state of knowledge for the topic of your research. In addition, you must explain your rationale for choosing this project, clearly state the objective or hypothesis, and predict the outcome of the experiments if the hypothesis holds true.
Example: if an independent research project investigated the effect of hand sanitizers on the growth of E. coli, then the introduction should include background information on hand sanitizers (what they are, how they are used, the ingredients that kill bacteria), and background information on E. coli (what it is, why it is a problem). It
Writing a good lab report is an important goal of your science education, and gives you the opportunity to enhance your writing skills and to communicate your understanding of the scientific process to others.
Your lab report for this semester will be a write up of your independent research project. This will follow the standard format for a lab report and should include the following sections:
Title
Introduction
Materials and Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
References
For this course we are giving extra emphasis to the materials and methods section. This section should include sufficient detail to allow others to reproduce your experiments, without being overly descriptive.
A guide to writing each section is as follows:
TITLE
Name the experiment.
The title should be descriptive of what you did or what your data showed. A reader should be able to obtain some understanding of the content of your report from the title. In the research world, scientists scan the table of contents of journals to determine if there are any papers relevant to their research that they should read. Therefore the title is important for getting your work recognized.
INTRODUCTION
Explain why you choose this project, and what you hoped to learn from it.
You will be required to research the background information for your project, and present the current state of knowledge for the topic of your research. In addition, you must explain your rationale for choosing this project, clearly state the objective or hypothesis, and predict the outcome of the experiments if the hypothesis holds true.
Example: if an independent research project investigated the effect of hand sanitizers on the growth of E. coli, then the introduction should include background information on hand sanitizers (what they are, how they are used, the ingredients that kill bacteria), and background information on E. coli (what it is, why it is a problem). It