In general, your laboratory report is an organized account of what you did in lab and a summary of your results. These reports must be type-written and Excel (or some other spreadsheet program) must be used to generate the graphs. No handwritten text, tables or graphs will be accepted.
Introduction: This section will introduce the rationale and significance of the experiment that you have done. Each lab exercise will have a list of questions/topics that you will address in the introduction. You will need to read the literature (libaray and www sources), your text and other texts in the library, and formulate a well organized introduction of the subject material and the methods you used to study the topic.
Methods: Fully describe what you did in lab. It will not suffice to simply refer to the lab instructions. Please give a detailed account of the actual methods and techniques that you used.
Results: Your results must be described in well organized paragraphs and summarized in publication quality tables and graphs. Your text description must refer to the data in the tables and or graphs e.g.:
As shown in Figure 3, the absorbance at 540nm increases as the concentration of cholesterol increases. Linear regression was used to determine the equation of the line for this standard curve, y=.98x +.005. This curve was then used to determine the concentration of cholesterol in the egg yolk sample....
Discussion/Conclusion: This section will summarize your findings and relate your data to literature and/or class data. Any problems that were encountered should be addressed in this section. If you were expecting a slope of 1 for your standard curve, and the slope you determined was 0.5, you need to analyze your technique and the method to present a rationale for this discrepancy. Be sure to consult the individual experiment instructions for the pertinent questions that will need to be addressed in this section.
References: Fully cite all of the references that you used for this report.
Journal articles: Author(s), title of article, title of journal. year. volume: pages.
Book chapters: Author, "title of chapter", title of book. year. publisher,location of publisher, pages.
WWW sources: Author, "title", complete URL. associated organization. date.
e.g.:
Stone, K. "Thankyou for not Smoking", http://wwwchem.csustan.edu/chem44x0/cigare2.htm. CSU, Stanislaus. September 6, 1997.
Each report will be graded based upon the following percentages:
| Thoroughness and clarity of the introduction | 30% |
| Thoroughness and clarity of the discussion | 30% |
| Results (ie lab technique) | 25% |
| Mechanics, ie spelling, grammer, punctuation, syntax | 15% |
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Last updated by Koni Stone on September 3, 1998.