Malik Quow March 20, 2022

– Title

Eight Basic Elements Of A Lab Report

When it comes to a Lab report your title should be an attention grabber to the reader. It should be informative enough to where the reader is intrigued to read the report. When writing a title you should have your reader in mind, an informative title helps engineers, scientist and medical physicians save time by using abstracting services to locate the research most relevant for their needs. Keep in mind that you should use keywords and abbreviations that your reader commonly uses and is familiar with.

– Abstract

The Abstract of your lab report is basically the summary of your entire report. The abstract explains each topic of your report. Each explanation should be about one or two sentences , this is because of space limitations. Each topic in your abstract should contain enough information so the reader can determine which part of the report they want to read first or if they should read the entire report. To add, don’t make your abstract descriptive, make each point brief, without presenting the important results or the conclusion.

– Introduction

The introduction is where you begin to discuss why your work is important. In this section of the report you want to describe the question or hypothesis that your study attempted to address, and also explain why this hypothesis is significant. It is imperative that you include previous research or relevant research in the introduction, this will help you describe how your study extends or improves the knowledge of your field of study. Be sure to provide enough information when describing your study to help readers understand how this study contributes new information to the field and clearly explains the purpose of your study. Furthermore, your introduction should briefly describe your methods on how you executed your lab. Persuade your methods to the reader on why your approach is appropriate given what has been executed in previous studies.

– Materials and Methods

Your materials and methods page should explain to your reader that your approach is appropriate for the hypothesis that you had hoped to answer. You should also include how you conducted your research and how your results are credible.You must describe your methods in a descriptive way to help another researcher execute your experiment using the same methods and materials. You want to include any human subjects that you included in your experiment such as, organisms, chemicals, tools and measuring devices. Make sure you describe your procedures, such as temperatures, observations dates and times, site locations for the field of study and instrument settings/calibrations.

– Results

The purposes of the results section is to summarize the data relevant to the question or hypothesis that you discussed in your introduction. Exclude data that doesn’t matter to the

experiment, however briefly explain why you are excluding said information. Emphasize major trends, magnitudes of values, associations and expectations. Make sure you present your results in the same order used when describing the steps in the methods section. Doing this will help the reader/experimenter follow the lab fluently without making any mistakes. In addition use data charts and maps and scatter plots in order to make your results section more clear and concise.

– Discussion

The discussion section also known as the analysis is where you will be answering your hypothesis or your question. In this section you can also argue against your own question/hypothesis.

– Conclusion

In your conclusion summarize the entire lab report. However, summarize the main points that you had covered in your report. Make sure you summarize your points in either one or two paragraphs. Furthermore, summarize the important findings of your report.

– Acknowledgments

While ending off your report, your acknowledgment page is made so you can honor the ones that helped you with the study or helped you prepare the lab report. If the study was supported by fundings make sure to list the source of financial support.

– References

In your reference page, list all your references you cited in the lab report. Your citations should also be in MLA format.

– Appendixes

After the references section, your appendixes section should follow right after. Your appendixes should include data charts, analyses and other calculations.