Your name and the name of your partner(s) The title of your experiment The date you conducted the experiment Your teacher’s name Information that identifies which class you are in
Keep your abstract brief and note the purpose of the experiment, the hypothesis, and any major findings.
If a diagram will help your audience understand your procedure, include it in this section. You may be tempted to write this as a list, but it’s best to stick to paragraph form. Some teachers may require a separate section on the materials and apparatuses that were used to conduct the experiment. If you are following instructions from a lab book, do not just copy the steps from the book. Explain the procedure in your own words to demonstrate that you understand how and why you are collecting each piece of data.
You may include graphs or charts that highlight the most important pieces of data here as well, but do not begin to analyze the data quite yet. Explain any reasonable uncertainties that may appear in your data. No experiment is completely free of uncertainties, so ask your teacher if you’re not sure what to include. Always include uncertainty bars in your graphs if the uncertainties of the data are known. Also discuss any potential sources of error and how those errors may have affected your experiment.
Some teachers may allow you to include your calculations in the data section of our report.
Include information about how your results compare to your expectations or hypothesis, what implications these results have for the world of physics, and what further experiments could be conducted to learn more about your results. You can also include your own ideas for improving upon the experiment. Be sure to include any graphs that would be appropriate to illustrate your analysis of the data and help your readers better understand it. [9] X Research source Some teachers may request that you create two separate analysis and conclusion sections.
Bullet pointed lists are not appropriate for most sections of your report. You may be able to use them for short sections like your materials and apparatuses list. Keep in mind that one of the main objectives of your lab report is to guide others in recreating your experiment. If you can’t clearly explain what you did and how you did it, no one will ever be able to reproduce your results.
Active sentences are usually easier to understand than passive sentences, so try to minimize your use of the passive voice whenever possible. For example, if you wrote, “These results are easily reproducible by anyone who has the correct equipment,” try changing it to “Anyone who has the correct equipment should be able to reproduce these results. " The passive voice is not always wrong, so don’t be afraid to leave a sentence in the passive voice if you think it makes more sense that way.
Don’t jump ahead and discuss the results of the experiment before you get to that section. Just because you understand everything that happened with your experiment, does not mean your readers will. You need to walk them through it step by step. Cut out any sentences that don’t add anything of substance to your report. Your readers will only get frustrated if they have to read through a bunch of fluff in order to find your main point.
For example, instead of writing, “I noticed that the data we gathered was not consistent with our previous results,” write, “The data is not consistent with the previous results. " It may be tricky to maintain active voice when writing in third person, so it’s okay to use passive voice if it makes more sense to do so.
The past tense is appropriate for discussing your procedure and the results of past experiments.
