CHAPTER 23 – LAB, EXPERIMENT AND FIELD REPORTS

The goal of this chapter is to accurately record and thoughtfully interpret the results of a scientific study or experiment so clearly that others could repeat your experiment. When writing a lab report, there are many formatting issues that we need to keep in mind. If we are writing lab reports for a chemistry course, for example, we will need to follow the guidelines as established by the teacher or professor. Although the requirements for lab report writing may differ somewhat from class to class, most will contain cover page, title, purpose, equipment and materials, procedure, results and discussions, conclusions, references. The cover page of the lab report should contain only a few, basic pieces of information but the title should appear on the top of the report. We must also state our "purpose" when we write a lab report. This portion of the lab report is written in order to describe why we are doing the experiment, what we hope to gain from the experiment, and what skills we will be able to develop by completing the experiment. Finally, we must cite all of the reference materials we used in the development of the lab report. Any materials we used to help you with the experiment or to help we draw our conclusions should be listed in this section. The writing should be straightforward and to-the-point in regard to the information presented. The text of a lab report should simply explain the scientific process that was used, as well as the results, but should not include our opinions on the experiment.