The Lab Write Up

Lab write ups differ slightly from place to place, so first consult your teacher. If you can't for any reason, here are the elements I recommend:

Title: What is this all about anyway? In a nutshell, how would you describe your investigation?

Purpose: Here you can expand on your title. This is where you should put your hypothesis.

Materials: Describe the materials you used.

Safety Procedures: Make sure other people who try this at home know what the dangers are and how to avoid them.

Procedures: Give a detailed description of what you did. That way another brilliant scientist can recreate your work or figure out exactly what you did.

Data and Analysis: Put all the relevant data here. You should put in all data and calculations you used to come up with your conclusion. Putting your aunt's shoe size, while interesting, is usually not important to your investigation.

Uncertainty (Error) Analysis: Here you should explain where your conclusions could be wrong or how certain you are of your data. (e.g. "Since the kangaroo was jumping at the time and we were driving along in the car, we could only measure it's height to plus or minus 10 cm.")

Conclusion: Tie it all together. Tell us if you found data to support your hypothesis (your guess was right) or not. Tell us if you had to change your hypothesis and what it all means. Note, this part must relate to your purpose. If it doesn’t either your conclusion or your purpose is incorrect.

http://www.math.uic.edu/oprf/science/mccarron/tank/labwrup.html

Last update: 25 February 2002