How to Perform an Excellent Lab Report: Guides and Instructions

A lab report is an academic paper where a writer must explain in detail the experiment conducted, methods used, data gathered, and the results. Every researcher once conducting an experiment must be very attentive to the procedure of a laboratory investigation.

Regularly, every student at laboratory courses must provide a lab report to get a final grade. If you want to submit an excellent lab report, you can use the following guides and instructions.

It is important to assure proper reports’ format and include all the needed information, figures, graphs, and other special elements in your report. In most cases, students can perform a lab report excellently when they know what they need to include in a report and the ways to conduct it properly.

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Lab Report Fundamentals

There is a list of important lab report elements that must be included. Thus, make sure to deal with the following fundamentals properly.

Title Page

When you need to write a title page, it must be a single page that reveals:

Your experiment’s title;
Your name;
Your partners’ names;
Your instructor’s name;
The exact date when a lab report was written or submitted.

Title

In the title, you must reveal what you did. Thus, you need to describe briefly (in ten words or fewer) the main points of your experiment. The example of a proper title can be the following:” The effect of modified food on a human’s brain activity”. It is recommended to use a keyword when starting your report’s title.

Introduction/Aim

When starting your lab report, you must provide an introduction. It must be an opening paragraph that explains and describes the main objectives or aims of your entire experiment. You can use background information or a brief summary of an experiment in your introduction if needed. Also, you can add your findings and investigation conclusions in this paragraph. You can skip an introduction part, but you still need to provide a clear aim of your investigation and explain why you did it. Also, you must state your hypothesis in this exact part of a report.

Materials

You must provide a list of materials used for your experiment.

Methodology

You need to describe every step of your investigation. Thus, make sure to describe the entire procedure. Be very careful with explanations and make them clear and concise. This will allow other researchers to duplicate your experiment in the future. You can provide diagrams or other visual aids as well.

Experiment Results

Describe all the findings and data gathered in words. Make it clear for readers. Moreover, you can add a discussion part additionally.

Analysis

This is an essential part of every experiment since here you must explain every number obtained. Therefore, all the calculations must be included and explained briefly in this section. Here you interpret your data and decide whether your hypothesis was correct. In case you have some mistakes with your research, you can discuss them in this section. You can add ways to improve the study if needed.

Conclusions

The conclusions are a single final paragraph where you share your personal opinion based on the findings and experiment results. You need to write a hypothesis and determine whether it was accepted or rejected.

Graphs and Figures

Graphs and figures are additional elements that must be included in a lab report. Make sure to write down the independent variable in X-axis and the dependent ones on Y-axis. Refer to graphs and figures in your report to support your findings.

List of References

If you use someone else’s works in your research, make sure to cite them properly in the references.