Lab Report Format

Do not copy and paste from this document into your lab report.  It will show up as plagiarism and cause you to stress unnecessarily.

All lab reports will be submitted through the Dropbox posted in the weekly lesson.  Do NOT submit the Experiment Tracking Sheet.  Use the headings below in your lab report.  Each report only has one of each section; combine all experiments into each section.  (Don't make a separate Procedure or Results section for each experiment.)  These directions must be followed in order to get full credit for the lab report.

Purpose In the purpose section, state which principles you will be testing, i.e. why you performed a certain experiment,  and which experiments will test each principle.    

Procedure Do not list equipment or chemicals.Summarize each experiment. Ex - "Iodine was added to peas, corn, and carrots to see which of them contained complex carbohydrates." Identify the independent, dependent, and control variables in the experiment.Do not include data in this section. 

HypothesesFor each experiment, include a hypothesis.The hypothesis must state the outcome of each experiment.  Ex - "Iodine will turn the onion, potato, and vegetable oil black."  Or "If iodine is added to onion, potato, and vegetable oil, then all three foods will turn black."  Not "If iodine is added to a food containing starch then the food will turn black."The hypothesis should not refer to any positive or negative control experiments.  Their outcome is already known.

ResultsYou must include tables and/or graphs in your results.You must have paragraphs describing the data in your tables and graphs.  Ex - "As seen in Figure 3, the starch and sugar water both turned black."If there are positive or negative control experiments, mention them here and whether they turned out as expected.Include one picture of each experiment or demonstration in this section.  Each picture should have a card showing your name included in the picture and also the subject of the picture.

Discussion

Making posts to a Discussion question is not a substitute for writing up this section.

Restate your hypotheses and indicate if they were right or wrong.If your hypotheses were incorrect, explain what you were thinking when you made the hypothesis and what you know now.If your positive or negative control experiments didn't work or the whole experiment flopped, identify likely sources of error.Think of at least one extra experiment you could do or type of data you could gather to extend the experiment further and state why you would do it.  This is not just "I'll take more time to do it" or "I'll take more measurements to make the experiment more accurate" or "I'll test more items." You have to think of something different to do to continue the experiment.

Regarding demonstrations even though you don't have to make up hypotheses for them, you must STILL include them in the Purpose, Procedure, and Results, as well as taking pictures of them.

Any questions asked in the Experiment Instructions for a given exercise should be answered.