Writing a Science Laboratory Report

Writing a scientific laboratory report is very much different from writing an essay for other courses such as English, literature, or history. The most popular form of presenting the results in the fields like biology, chemistry, physics, and other sciences is the lab report, which is a formally written description of results and discoveries found in an experiment. Secondary education and college lab reports should follow the same formats as reports found in scientific and scholarly journals, such as Science, Nature, Cell, ...etc. This class discusses a general format for lab reports that you can adapt when necessary. Regardless of the length and variations, the aim goal of lab reports is to document the findings and communicate their importance in a clear fashion. A good lab report should demonstrate the author’s comprehension of the concepts behind the data. It should be able to identify how and why the specific results occurred, how they affected the experiment, and show the understanding of the principles that were designed to be tested.