PURPOSE
Laboratory exercises can offer some of the most important experiences students can have in science class. One of their greatest strengths is that they can help show students what it means to think, feel, and act like a scientist. In other words, they can help show students what it means to be a scientist.
To help us keep track of our lab work, we often create documents that we call Lab Reports (LR). LRs are meant to be concise and accurate, but also thorough. They are summative reports of our investigations. Furthermore, they are meant to serve as useful transition documents between your lab/field notebook–where you record all of your experimental observations and raw data–and the completion of other assignments such as Science Fair Projects and Research Articles. Thus, we use Lab Reports as tools with which to document–in a highly thorough manner–the planning, execution, and results of our lab exercises in an effort to ensure that the quality of some of our other important course assignments remains high.
FORM
Typically, Lab Reports take a paper or digital form. They consist of three distinct parts–called Pre-Lab, In-Lab, and Post-Lab–and each part is a highly structured document that conforms to a pre-set outline. They involve a fair amount of writing or typing, but not nearly as much as a Research Article. Remember, the emphasis of Lab Reports is to find a productive balance between (on the one hand) brevity and precision and (on the other hand) quality and thoroughness.
FREQUENCY
Typically, there is never more than one Lab Report to complete within a single school week. Instead, it is much more common to have one LR to complete every two or three weeks.
TYPES OF LABORATORY INVESTIGATIONS
[We’re sorry, this section is currently under construction (September 2015).]
LAB INVESTIGATION TEMPLATES
| Stage | Descriptive |
Comparative | Experimental |
| Pre-Lab | PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
| In-Lab | PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
| Post-Lab | PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |
PDF MS Word Mac Pages Google Doc |