How to write a formal lab report…

Take notes so you can write a good one…

Title page

• Your title page should have the title of the lab predominately displayed either at the top or in the middle of the page

• Underneath the title, you should have your name followed by your lab partner’s name

• Your name should be larger and more prominent than your partners’

Parts of Your lab report(and the points of each part)

• The report should have the following sections:– Purpose (10 points)– Materials used (10 points)– Procedure (25 points)– Data (10 points)– Graph (20 points)– Analysis and Conclusion (20 points)– Discussion of sources of error (5 points)

Purpose

• The purpose of the lab should be a statement of what you are intending to discover, prove, or measure.

• Example:– The purpose of this experiment is to determine

the amount of heat needed to raise a sample of water from its melting temperature to its boiling temperature.

Materials List

• This can be a bulleted list of the equipment used in the lab

Procedure

• This should be a step by step directions of what you did in the experiment.

• Your goal is to explain it well enough for any schmoe off the street to be able to follow the directions and perform the experiment and get the same results you did.

• In short, make it “idiot-proof”

Data

• This should be a well designed data table displaying the data you collected.

• You can create the data table in Excel and then import into Word if you’d like, or you can use the insert table function of Word to do so.

Graph

• Your graph should be done on the computer using the graph function in Excel.

• I will show you how to do this in the computer lab tomorrow if you don’t know how.– It would help if you already have the data table

entered into an excel file when class starts…

Analysis and Conclusion• The analysis section should answer the following questions

– What happened to the temperature during the process of melting (before the ice was completely gone?

– What happened to the temperature after the water began boiling?– What is the general trend of the graph as the water heated from freezing to

boiling (is it linear, quadratic, exponential?)• Your conclusion should answer the PURPOSE of the lab…your purpose

was to determine the amount of energy required to raise the temperature from freezing to boiling, so you will need to show those calculations and answer that purpose in your conclusion

• The analysis and conclusion section should be written in paragrah form if you simply give me a bulleted or numbered list in which you answer the questions above, you will get NO CREDIT for this section.

Discussion of Sources of error

• Since all experiments have error, you should discuss the possible sources of error in your experiment…things that occurred during the lab that could cause your values to be incorrect.

• Human error is always a source of error but it is not an acceptable answer to your error analysis unless you can explain exactly what error the human made.

Example

• There will be a document on my website that will show the proper format of a lab report…

• It will have some of the information you should have in your report, but the great majority of it will be gobbledygook…meaning, it is intended to show you what your report should look like, not the answer to every part of the lab…you actually have to do that part yourself.