The Lab Report

Sometimes the marker will have put a lab exercise into the curriculum so you can gain some knowledge about your subject. This might be done by way of a standard lab procedure designed to measure or create something entirely predictable, where only human or equipment error could lead you to a negative result. Sometimes they will have put them into the curriculum so you can get practice at a particular technique. Molecular biologists need to know how to pipette; animal and human biologists need to see how a skeleton articulates; physicists need to know how to operate standard detection equipment; chemists need to be confident with the operation of burettes and fine balances. Sometimes a lab will be on the curriculum because the experiments will be rich in data for you to record. Perhaps you’ll end up measuring many different features of many individual samples, leading to a large and varied results section with lots of data types for you to manipulate. Sometimes labs will have been designed to challenge your ability to follow the scientific method. For example, labs in later years of degrees often begin with open questions, and you then have a chance to design and refine your own procedures (or ‘protocols’) based on the questions you alone are responsible for thinking up. This isn’t an exhaustive list of reasons that staff might put labs into your course, but in each of these different scenarios, the type of report you write may be quite different in substance and in the relative sizes of each section. Ask yourself if you can identify what seems to be most valuable to your marker, and consider whether to place more emphasis on this part of your report.