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How To Write A Lab Report | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on May 20, 2021 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A lab report conveys the aim, methods, results, and conclusions of a scientific experiment. The main purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method by performing and evaluating a hands-on lab experiment. This type of assignment is usually shorter than a research paper .

Lab reports are commonly used in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This article focuses on how to structure and write a lab report.

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Table of contents

Structuring a lab report, introduction, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about lab reports.

The sections of a lab report can vary between scientific fields and course requirements, but they usually contain the purpose, methods, and findings of a lab experiment .

Each section of a lab report has its own purpose.

• Title: expresses the topic of your study
• Abstract : summarizes your research aims, methods, results, and conclusions
• Introduction: establishes the context needed to understand the topic
• Method: describes the materials and procedures used in the experiment
• Results: reports all descriptive and inferential statistical analyses
• Discussion: interprets and evaluates results and identifies limitations
• Conclusion: sums up the main findings of your experiment
• References: list of all sources cited using a specific style (e.g. APA )
• Appendices : contains lengthy materials, procedures, tables or figures

Although most lab reports contain these sections, some sections can be omitted or combined with others. For example, some lab reports contain a brief section on research aims instead of an introduction, and a separate conclusion is not always required.

If you’re not sure, it’s best to check your lab report requirements with your instructor.

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Your title provides the first impression of your lab report – effective titles communicate the topic and/or the findings of your study in specific terms.

Create a title that directly conveys the main focus or purpose of your study. It doesn’t need to be creative or thought-provoking, but it should be informative.

• The effects of varying nitrogen levels on tomato plant height.
• Testing the universality of the McGurk effect.
• Comparing the viscosity of common liquids found in kitchens.

An abstract condenses a lab report into a brief overview of about 150–300 words. It should provide readers with a compact version of the research aims, the methods and materials used, the main results, and the final conclusion.

Think of it as a way of giving readers a preview of your full lab report. Write the abstract last, in the past tense, after you’ve drafted all the other sections of your report, so you’ll be able to succinctly summarize each section.

To write a lab report abstract, use these guiding questions:

• What is the wider context of your study?
• What research question were you trying to answer?
• How did you perform the experiment?
• What did your results show?
• How did you interpret your results?
• What is the importance of your findings?

Nitrogen is a necessary nutrient for high quality plants. Tomatoes, one of the most consumed fruits worldwide, rely on nitrogen for healthy leaves and stems to grow fruit. This experiment tested whether nitrogen levels affected tomato plant height in a controlled setting. It was expected that higher levels of nitrogen fertilizer would yield taller tomato plants.

Levels of nitrogen fertilizer were varied between three groups of tomato plants. The control group did not receive any nitrogen fertilizer, while one experimental group received low levels of nitrogen fertilizer, and a second experimental group received high levels of nitrogen fertilizer. All plants were grown from seeds, and heights were measured 50 days into the experiment.

The effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were tested between groups using an ANOVA. The plants with the highest level of nitrogen fertilizer were the tallest, while the plants with low levels of nitrogen exceeded the control group plants in height. In line with expectations and previous findings, the effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were statistically significant. This study strengthens the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants.

Your lab report introduction should set the scene for your experiment. One way to write your introduction is with a funnel (an inverted triangle) structure:

• Start with the broad, general research topic
• Narrow your topic down your specific study focus
• End with a clear research question

Begin by providing background information on your research topic and explaining why it’s important in a broad real-world or theoretical context. Describe relevant previous research on your topic and note how your study may confirm it or expand it, or fill a gap in the research field.

This lab experiment builds on previous research from Haque, Paul, and Sarker (2011), who demonstrated that tomato plant yield increased at higher levels of nitrogen. However, the present research focuses on plant height as a growth indicator and uses a lab-controlled setting instead.

Next, go into detail on the theoretical basis for your study and describe any directly relevant laws or equations that you’ll be using. State your main research aims and expectations by outlining your hypotheses .

Based on the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants, the primary hypothesis was that the plants with the high levels of nitrogen would grow the tallest. The secondary hypothesis was that plants with low levels of nitrogen would grow taller than plants with no nitrogen.

Your introduction doesn’t need to be long, but you may need to organize it into a few paragraphs or with subheadings such as “Research Context” or “Research Aims.”

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A lab report Method section details the steps you took to gather and analyze data. Give enough detail so that others can follow or evaluate your procedures. Write this section in the past tense. If you need to include any long lists of procedural steps or materials, place them in the Appendices section but refer to them in the text here.

You should describe your experimental design, your subjects, materials, and specific procedures used for data collection and analysis.

Experimental design

Briefly note whether your experiment is a within-subjects  or between-subjects design, and describe how your sample units were assigned to conditions if relevant.

A between-subjects design with three groups of tomato plants was used. The control group did not receive any nitrogen fertilizer. The first experimental group received a low level of nitrogen fertilizer, while the second experimental group received a high level of nitrogen fertilizer.

Describe human subjects in terms of demographic characteristics, and animal or plant subjects in terms of genetic background. Note the total number of subjects as well as the number of subjects per condition or per group. You should also state how you recruited subjects for your study.

List the equipment or materials you used to gather data and state the model names for any specialized equipment.

List of materials

35 Tomato seeds

15 plant pots (15 cm tall)

Light lamps (50,000 lux)

Nitrogen fertilizer

Measuring tape

Describe your experimental settings and conditions in detail. You can provide labelled diagrams or images of the exact set-up necessary for experimental equipment. State how extraneous variables were controlled through restriction or by fixing them at a certain level (e.g., keeping the lab at room temperature).

Light levels were fixed throughout the experiment, and the plants were exposed to 12 hours of light a day. Temperature was restricted to between 23 and 25℃. The pH and carbon levels of the soil were also held constant throughout the experiment as these variables could influence plant height. The plants were grown in rooms free of insects or other pests, and they were spaced out adequately.

Your experimental procedure should describe the exact steps you took to gather data in chronological order. You’ll need to provide enough information so that someone else can replicate your procedure, but you should also be concise. Place detailed information in the appendices where appropriate.

In a lab experiment, you’ll often closely follow a lab manual to gather data. Some instructors will allow you to simply reference the manual and state whether you changed any steps based on practical considerations. Other instructors may want you to rewrite the lab manual procedures as complete sentences in coherent paragraphs, while noting any changes to the steps that you applied in practice.

If you’re performing extensive data analysis, be sure to state your planned analysis methods as well. This includes the types of tests you’ll perform and any programs or software you’ll use for calculations (if relevant).

First, tomato seeds were sown in wooden flats containing soil about 2 cm below the surface. Each seed was kept 3-5 cm apart. The flats were covered to keep the soil moist until germination. The seedlings were removed and transplanted to pots 8 days later, with a maximum of 2 plants to a pot. Each pot was watered once a day to keep the soil moist.

The nitrogen fertilizer treatment was applied to the plant pots 12 days after transplantation. The control group received no treatment, while the first experimental group received a low concentration, and the second experimental group received a high concentration. There were 5 pots in each group, and each plant pot was labelled to indicate the group the plants belonged to.

50 days after the start of the experiment, plant height was measured for all plants. A measuring tape was used to record the length of the plant from ground level to the top of the tallest leaf.

In your results section, you should report the results of any statistical analysis procedures that you undertook. You should clearly state how the results of statistical tests support or refute your initial hypotheses.

The main results to report include:

• any descriptive statistics
• statistical test results
• the significance of the test results
• estimates of standard error or confidence intervals

The mean heights of the plants in the control group, low nitrogen group, and high nitrogen groups were 20.3, 25.1, and 29.6 cm respectively. A one-way ANOVA was applied to calculate the effect of nitrogen fertilizer level on plant height. The results demonstrated statistically significant ( p = .03) height differences between groups.

Next, post-hoc tests were performed to assess the primary and secondary hypotheses. In support of the primary hypothesis, the high nitrogen group plants were significantly taller than the low nitrogen group and the control group plants. Similarly, the results supported the secondary hypothesis: the low nitrogen plants were taller than the control group plants.

These results can be reported in the text or in tables and figures. Use text for highlighting a few key results, but present large sets of numbers in tables, or show relationships between variables with graphs.

You should also include sample calculations in the Results section for complex experiments. For each sample calculation, provide a brief description of what it does and use clear symbols. Present your raw data in the Appendices section and refer to it to highlight any outliers or trends.

The Discussion section will help demonstrate your understanding of the experimental process and your critical thinking skills.

In this section, you can:

• Interpret your results
• Compare your findings with your expectations
• Identify any sources of experimental error
• Explain any unexpected results
• Suggest possible improvements for further studies

Interpreting your results involves clarifying how your results help you answer your main research question. Report whether your results support your hypotheses.

• Did you measure what you sought out to measure?
• Were your analysis procedures appropriate for this type of data?

Compare your findings with other research and explain any key differences in findings.

• Are your results in line with those from previous studies or your classmates’ results? Why or why not?

An effective Discussion section will also highlight the strengths and limitations of a study.

• Did you have high internal validity or reliability?
• How did you establish these aspects of your study?

When describing limitations, use specific examples. For example, if random error contributed substantially to the measurements in your study, state the particular sources of error (e.g., imprecise apparatus) and explain ways to improve them.

The results support the hypothesis that nitrogen levels affect plant height, with increasing levels producing taller plants. These statistically significant results are taken together with previous research to support the importance of nitrogen as a nutrient for tomato plant growth.

However, unlike previous studies, this study focused on plant height as an indicator of plant growth in the present experiment. Importantly, plant height may not always reflect plant health or fruit yield, so measuring other indicators would have strengthened the study findings.

Another limitation of the study is the plant height measurement technique, as the measuring tape was not suitable for plants with extreme curvature. Future studies may focus on measuring plant height in different ways.

The main strengths of this study were the controls for extraneous variables, such as pH and carbon levels of the soil. All other factors that could affect plant height were tightly controlled to isolate the effects of nitrogen levels, resulting in high internal validity for this study.

Your conclusion should be the final section of your lab report. Here, you’ll summarize the findings of your experiment, with a brief overview of the strengths and limitations, and implications of your study for further research.

Some lab reports may omit a Conclusion section because it overlaps with the Discussion section, but you should check with your instructor before doing so.

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A lab report conveys the aim, methods, results, and conclusions of a scientific experiment . Lab reports are commonly assigned in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method with a hands-on lab experiment. Course instructors will often provide you with an experimental design and procedure. Your task is to write up how you actually performed the experiment and evaluate the outcome.

In contrast, a research paper requires you to independently develop an original argument. It involves more in-depth research and interpretation of sources and data.

A lab report is usually shorter than a research paper.

The sections of a lab report can vary between scientific fields and course requirements, but it usually contains the following:

• Abstract: summarizes your research aims, methods, results, and conclusions
• References: list of all sources cited using a specific style (e.g. APA)
• Appendices: contains lengthy materials, procedures, tables or figures

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

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How to Write a Lab Report – with Example/Template

April 11, 2024

Perhaps you’re in the midst of your challenging AP chemistry class in high school, or perhaps college you’re enrolled in biology , chemistry , or physics at university. At some point, you will likely be asked to write a lab report. Sometimes, your teacher or professor will give you specific instructions for how to format and write your lab report, and if so, use that. In case you’re left to your own devices, here are some guidelines you might find useful. Continue reading for the main elements of a lab report, followed by a detailed description of the more writing-heavy parts (with a lab report example/lab report template). Lastly, we’ve included an outline that can help get you started.

What is a lab report?

A lab report is an overview of your experiment. Essentially, it explains what you did in the experiment and how it went. Most lab reports end up being 5-10 pages long (graphs or other images included), though the length depends on the experiment. Here are some brief explanations of the essential parts of a lab report:

Title : The title says, in the most straightforward way possible, what you did in the experiment. Often, the title looks something like, “Effects of ____ on _____.” Sometimes, a lab report also requires a title page, which includes your name (and the names of any lab partners), your instructor’s name, and the date of the experiment.

Abstract : This is a short description of key findings of the experiment so that a potential reader could get an idea of the experiment before even beginning.

Introduction : This is comprised of one or several paragraphs summarizing the purpose of the lab. The introduction usually includes the hypothesis, as well as some background information.

Lab Report Example (Continued)

Materials : Perhaps the simplest part of your lab report, this is where you list everything needed for the completion of your experiment.

Methods : This is where you describe your experimental procedure. The section provides necessary information for someone who would want to replicate your study. In paragraph form, write out your methods in chronological order, though avoid excessive detail.

Data : Here, you should document what happened in the experiment, step-by-step. This section often includes graphs and tables with data, as well as descriptions of patterns and trends. You do not need to interpret all of the data in this section, but you can describe trends or patterns, and state which findings are interesting and/or significant.

Discussion of results : This is the overview of your findings from the experiment, with an explanation of how they pertain to your hypothesis, as well as any anomalies or errors.

Conclusion : Your conclusion will sum up the results of your experiment, as well as their significance. Sometimes, conclusions also suggest future studies.

Sources : Often in APA style , you should list all texts that helped you with your experiment. Make sure to include course readings, outside sources, and other experiments that you may have used to design your own.

How to write the abstract

The abstract is the experiment stated “in a nutshell”: the procedure, results, and a few key words. The purpose of the academic abstract is to help a potential reader get an idea of the experiment so they can decide whether to read the full paper. So, make sure your abstract is as clear and direct as possible, and under 200 words (though word count varies).

When writing an abstract for a scientific lab report, we recommend covering the following points:

• Background : Why was this experiment conducted?
• Objectives : What problem is being addressed by this experiment?
• Methods : How was the study designed and conducted?
• Results : What results were found and what do they mean?
• Conclusion : Were the results expected? Is this problem better understood now than before? If so, how?

How to write the introduction

The introduction is another summary, of sorts, so it could be easy to confuse the introduction with the abstract. While the abstract tends to be around 200 words summarizing the entire study, the introduction can be longer if necessary, covering background information on the study, what you aim to accomplish, and your hypothesis. Unlike the abstract (or the conclusion), the introduction does not need to state the results of the experiment.

Here is a possible order with which you can organize your lab report introduction:

• Intro of the intro : Plainly state what your study is doing.
• Background : Provide a brief overview of the topic being studied. This could include key terms and definitions. This should not be an extensive literature review, but rather, a window into the most relevant topics a reader would need to understand in order to understand your research.
• Importance : Now, what are the gaps in existing research? Given the background you just provided, what questions do you still have that led you to conduct this experiment? Are you clarifying conflicting results? Are you undertaking a new area of research altogether?
• Prediction: The plants placed by the window will grow faster than plants placed in the dark corner.
• Hypothesis: Basil plants placed in direct sunlight for 2 hours per day grow at a higher rate than basil plants placed in direct sunlight for 30 minutes per day.
• How you test your hypothesis : This is an opportunity to briefly state how you go about your experiment, but this is not the time to get into specific details about your methods (save this for your results section). Keep this part down to one sentence, and voila! You have your introduction.

How to write a discussion section

Here, we’re skipping ahead to the next writing-heavy section, which will directly follow the numeric data of your experiment. The discussion includes any calculations and interpretations based on this data. In other words, it says, “Now that we have the data, why should we care?”  This section asks, how does this data sit in relation to the hypothesis? Does it prove your hypothesis or disprove it? The discussion is also a good place to mention any mistakes that were made during the experiment, and ways you would improve the experiment if you were to repeat it. Like the other written sections, it should be as concise as possible.

Here is a list of points to cover in your lab report discussion:

• Weaker statement: These findings prove that basil plants grow more quickly in the sunlight.
• Stronger statement: These findings support the hypothesis that basil plants placed in direct sunlight grow at a higher rate than basil plants given less direct sunlight.
• Factors influencing results : This is also an opportunity to mention any anomalies, errors, or inconsistencies in your data. Perhaps when you tested the first round of basil plants, the days were sunnier than the others. Perhaps one of the basil pots broke mid-experiment so it needed to be replanted, which affected your results. If you were to repeat the study, how would you change it so that the results were more consistent?
• Implications : How do your results contribute to existing research? Here, refer back to the gaps in research that you mentioned in your introduction. Do these results fill these gaps as you hoped?
• Questions for future research : Based on this, how might your results contribute to future research? What are the next steps, or the next experiments on this topic? Make sure this does not become too broad—keep it to the scope of this project.

How to write a lab report conclusion

This is your opportunity to briefly remind the reader of your findings and finish strong. Your conclusion should be especially concise (avoid going into detail on findings or introducing new information).

Here are elements to include as you write your conclusion, in about 1-2 sentences each:

• Restate your goals : What was the main question of your experiment? Refer back to your introduction—similar language is okay.
• Restate your methods : In a sentence or so, how did you go about your experiment?
• Key findings : Briefly summarize your main results, but avoid going into detail.
• Limitations : What about your experiment was less-than-ideal, and how could you improve upon the experiment in future studies?
• Significance and future research : Why is your research important? What are the logical next-steps for studying this topic?

Template for beginning your lab report

Here is a compiled outline from the bullet points in these sections above, with some examples based on the (overly-simplistic) basil growth experiment. Hopefully this will be useful as you begin your lab report.

1) Title (ex: Effects of Sunlight on Basil Plant Growth )

2) Abstract (approx. 200 words)

• Background ( This experiment looks at… )
• Objectives ( It aims to contribute to research on…)
• Methods ( It does so through a process of…. )
• Results (Findings supported the hypothesis that… )
• Conclusion (These results contribute to a wider understanding about…)

3) Introduction (approx. 1-2 paragraphs)

• Intro ( This experiment looks at… )
• Background ( Past studies on basil plant growth and sunlight have found…)
• Importance ( This experiment will contribute to these past studies by…)
• Hypothesis ( Basil plants placed in direct sunlight for 2 hours per day grow at a higher rate than basil plants placed in direct sunlight for 30 minutes per day.)
• How you will test your hypothesis ( This hypothesis will be tested by a process of…)

4) Materials (list form) (ex: pots, soil, seeds, tables/stands, water, light source )

5) Methods (approx. 1-2 paragraphs) (ex: 10 basil plants were measured throughout a span of…)

6) Data (brief description and figures) (ex: These charts demonstrate a pattern that the basil plants placed in direct sunlight…)

7) Discussion (approx. 2-3 paragraphs)

• Support or reject hypothesis ( These findings support the hypothesis that basil plants placed in direct sunlight grow at a higher rate than basil plants given less direct sunlight.)
• Factors that influenced your results ( Outside factors that could have altered the results include…)
• Implications ( These results contribute to current research on basil plant growth and sunlight because…)
• Questions for further research ( Next steps for this research could include…)
• Restate your goals ( In summary, the goal of this experiment was to measure…)
• Restate your methods ( This hypothesis was tested by…)
• Key findings ( The findings supported the hypothesis because…)
• Limitations ( Although, certain elements were overlooked, including…)
• Significance and future research ( This experiment presents possibilities of future research contributions, such as…)
• Sources (approx. 1 page, usually in APA style)

Final thoughts – Lab Report Example

Hopefully, these descriptions have helped as you write your next lab report. Remember that different instructors may have different preferences for structure and format, so make sure to double-check when you receive your assignment. All in all, make sure to keep your scientific lab report concise, focused, honest, and organized. Good luck!

For more reading on coursework success, check out the following articles:

• How to Write the AP Lang Argument Essay (With Example)
• How to Write the AP Lang Rhetorical Analysis Essay (With Example)
• 49 Most Interesting Biology Research Topics
• 50 Best Environmental Science Research Topics
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Scientific Reports

What this handout is about.

This handout provides a general guide to writing reports about scientific research you’ve performed. In addition to describing the conventional rules about the format and content of a lab report, we’ll also attempt to convey why these rules exist, so you’ll get a clearer, more dependable idea of how to approach this writing situation. Readers of this handout may also find our handout on writing in the sciences useful.

Background and pre-writing

Why do we write research reports.

You did an experiment or study for your science class, and now you have to write it up for your teacher to review. You feel that you understood the background sufficiently, designed and completed the study effectively, obtained useful data, and can use those data to draw conclusions about a scientific process or principle. But how exactly do you write all that? What is your teacher expecting to see?

To take some of the guesswork out of answering these questions, try to think beyond the classroom setting. In fact, you and your teacher are both part of a scientific community, and the people who participate in this community tend to share the same values. As long as you understand and respect these values, your writing will likely meet the expectations of your audience—including your teacher.

So why are you writing this research report? The practical answer is “Because the teacher assigned it,” but that’s classroom thinking. Generally speaking, people investigating some scientific hypothesis have a responsibility to the rest of the scientific world to report their findings, particularly if these findings add to or contradict previous ideas. The people reading such reports have two primary goals:

• They want to gather the information presented.
• They want to know that the findings are legitimate.

Your job as a writer, then, is to fulfill these two goals.

How do I do that?

Good question. Here is the basic format scientists have designed for research reports:

• Introduction

Methods and Materials

This format, sometimes called “IMRAD,” may take slightly different shapes depending on the discipline or audience; some ask you to include an abstract or separate section for the hypothesis, or call the Discussion section “Conclusions,” or change the order of the sections (some professional and academic journals require the Methods section to appear last). Overall, however, the IMRAD format was devised to represent a textual version of the scientific method.

The scientific method, you’ll probably recall, involves developing a hypothesis, testing it, and deciding whether your findings support the hypothesis. In essence, the format for a research report in the sciences mirrors the scientific method but fleshes out the process a little. Below, you’ll find a table that shows how each written section fits into the scientific method and what additional information it offers the reader.

Thinking of your research report as based on the scientific method, but elaborated in the ways described above, may help you to meet your audience’s expectations successfully. We’re going to proceed by explicitly connecting each section of the lab report to the scientific method, then explaining why and how you need to elaborate that section.

Although this handout takes each section in the order in which it should be presented in the final report, you may for practical reasons decide to compose sections in another order. For example, many writers find that composing their Methods and Results before the other sections helps to clarify their idea of the experiment or study as a whole. You might consider using each assignment to practice different approaches to drafting the report, to find the order that works best for you.

What should I do before drafting the lab report?

The best way to prepare to write the lab report is to make sure that you fully understand everything you need to about the experiment. Obviously, if you don’t quite know what went on during the lab, you’re going to find it difficult to explain the lab satisfactorily to someone else. To make sure you know enough to write the report, complete the following steps:

• What are we going to do in this lab? (That is, what’s the procedure?)
• Why are we going to do it that way?
• What are we hoping to learn from this experiment?
• Why would we benefit from this knowledge?
• Consult your lab supervisor as you perform the lab. If you don’t know how to answer one of the questions above, for example, your lab supervisor will probably be able to explain it to you (or, at least, help you figure it out).
• Plan the steps of the experiment carefully with your lab partners. The less you rush, the more likely it is that you’ll perform the experiment correctly and record your findings accurately. Also, take some time to think about the best way to organize the data before you have to start putting numbers down. If you can design a table to account for the data, that will tend to work much better than jotting results down hurriedly on a scrap piece of paper.
• Record the data carefully so you get them right. You won’t be able to trust your conclusions if you have the wrong data, and your readers will know you messed up if the other three people in your group have “97 degrees” and you have “87.”
• Consult with your lab partners about everything you do. Lab groups often make one of two mistakes: two people do all the work while two have a nice chat, or everybody works together until the group finishes gathering the raw data, then scrams outta there. Collaborate with your partners, even when the experiment is “over.” What trends did you observe? Was the hypothesis supported? Did you all get the same results? What kind of figure should you use to represent your findings? The whole group can work together to answer these questions.
• Consider your audience. You may believe that audience is a non-issue: it’s your lab TA, right? Well, yes—but again, think beyond the classroom. If you write with only your lab instructor in mind, you may omit material that is crucial to a complete understanding of your experiment, because you assume the instructor knows all that stuff already. As a result, you may receive a lower grade, since your TA won’t be sure that you understand all the principles at work. Try to write towards a student in the same course but a different lab section. That student will have a fair degree of scientific expertise but won’t know much about your experiment particularly. Alternatively, you could envision yourself five years from now, after the reading and lectures for this course have faded a bit. What would you remember, and what would you need explained more clearly (as a refresher)?

Once you’ve completed these steps as you perform the experiment, you’ll be in a good position to draft an effective lab report.

Introductions

How do i write a strong introduction.

For the purposes of this handout, we’ll consider the Introduction to contain four basic elements: the purpose, the scientific literature relevant to the subject, the hypothesis, and the reasons you believed your hypothesis viable. Let’s start by going through each element of the Introduction to clarify what it covers and why it’s important. Then we can formulate a logical organizational strategy for the section.

The inclusion of the purpose (sometimes called the objective) of the experiment often confuses writers. The biggest misconception is that the purpose is the same as the hypothesis. Not quite. We’ll get to hypotheses in a minute, but basically they provide some indication of what you expect the experiment to show. The purpose is broader, and deals more with what you expect to gain through the experiment. In a professional setting, the hypothesis might have something to do with how cells react to a certain kind of genetic manipulation, but the purpose of the experiment is to learn more about potential cancer treatments. Undergraduate reports don’t often have this wide-ranging a goal, but you should still try to maintain the distinction between your hypothesis and your purpose. In a solubility experiment, for example, your hypothesis might talk about the relationship between temperature and the rate of solubility, but the purpose is probably to learn more about some specific scientific principle underlying the process of solubility.

For starters, most people say that you should write out your working hypothesis before you perform the experiment or study. Many beginning science students neglect to do so and find themselves struggling to remember precisely which variables were involved in the process or in what way the researchers felt that they were related. Write your hypothesis down as you develop it—you’ll be glad you did.

As for the form a hypothesis should take, it’s best not to be too fancy or complicated; an inventive style isn’t nearly so important as clarity here. There’s nothing wrong with beginning your hypothesis with the phrase, “It was hypothesized that . . .” Be as specific as you can about the relationship between the different objects of your study. In other words, explain that when term A changes, term B changes in this particular way. Readers of scientific writing are rarely content with the idea that a relationship between two terms exists—they want to know what that relationship entails.

Not a hypothesis:

“It was hypothesized that there is a significant relationship between the temperature of a solvent and the rate at which a solute dissolves.”

Hypothesis:

“It was hypothesized that as the temperature of a solvent increases, the rate at which a solute will dissolve in that solvent increases.”

Put more technically, most hypotheses contain both an independent and a dependent variable. The independent variable is what you manipulate to test the reaction; the dependent variable is what changes as a result of your manipulation. In the example above, the independent variable is the temperature of the solvent, and the dependent variable is the rate of solubility. Be sure that your hypothesis includes both variables.

Justify your hypothesis

You need to do more than tell your readers what your hypothesis is; you also need to assure them that this hypothesis was reasonable, given the circumstances. In other words, use the Introduction to explain that you didn’t just pluck your hypothesis out of thin air. (If you did pluck it out of thin air, your problems with your report will probably extend beyond using the appropriate format.) If you posit that a particular relationship exists between the independent and the dependent variable, what led you to believe your “guess” might be supported by evidence?

Scientists often refer to this type of justification as “motivating” the hypothesis, in the sense that something propelled them to make that prediction. Often, motivation includes what we already know—or rather, what scientists generally accept as true (see “Background/previous research” below). But you can also motivate your hypothesis by relying on logic or on your own observations. If you’re trying to decide which solutes will dissolve more rapidly in a solvent at increased temperatures, you might remember that some solids are meant to dissolve in hot water (e.g., bouillon cubes) and some are used for a function precisely because they withstand higher temperatures (they make saucepans out of something). Or you can think about whether you’ve noticed sugar dissolving more rapidly in your glass of iced tea or in your cup of coffee. Even such basic, outside-the-lab observations can help you justify your hypothesis as reasonable.

Background/previous research

This part of the Introduction demonstrates to the reader your awareness of how you’re building on other scientists’ work. If you think of the scientific community as engaging in a series of conversations about various topics, then you’ll recognize that the relevant background material will alert the reader to which conversation you want to enter.

Generally speaking, authors writing journal articles use the background for slightly different purposes than do students completing assignments. Because readers of academic journals tend to be professionals in the field, authors explain the background in order to permit readers to evaluate the study’s pertinence for their own work. You, on the other hand, write toward a much narrower audience—your peers in the course or your lab instructor—and so you must demonstrate that you understand the context for the (presumably assigned) experiment or study you’ve completed. For example, if your professor has been talking about polarity during lectures, and you’re doing a solubility experiment, you might try to connect the polarity of a solid to its relative solubility in certain solvents. In any event, both professional researchers and undergraduates need to connect the background material overtly to their own work.

Organization of this section

Most of the time, writers begin by stating the purpose or objectives of their own work, which establishes for the reader’s benefit the “nature and scope of the problem investigated” (Day 1994). Once you have expressed your purpose, you should then find it easier to move from the general purpose, to relevant material on the subject, to your hypothesis. In abbreviated form, an Introduction section might look like this:

“The purpose of the experiment was to test conventional ideas about solubility in the laboratory [purpose] . . . According to Whitecoat and Labrat (1999), at higher temperatures the molecules of solvents move more quickly . . . We know from the class lecture that molecules moving at higher rates of speed collide with one another more often and thus break down more easily [background material/motivation] . . . Thus, it was hypothesized that as the temperature of a solvent increases, the rate at which a solute will dissolve in that solvent increases [hypothesis].”

Again—these are guidelines, not commandments. Some writers and readers prefer different structures for the Introduction. The one above merely illustrates a common approach to organizing material.

How do I write a strong Materials and Methods section?

As with any piece of writing, your Methods section will succeed only if it fulfills its readers’ expectations, so you need to be clear in your own mind about the purpose of this section. Let’s review the purpose as we described it above: in this section, you want to describe in detail how you tested the hypothesis you developed and also to clarify the rationale for your procedure. In science, it’s not sufficient merely to design and carry out an experiment. Ultimately, others must be able to verify your findings, so your experiment must be reproducible, to the extent that other researchers can follow the same procedure and obtain the same (or similar) results.

Here’s a real-world example of the importance of reproducibility. In 1989, physicists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman announced that they had discovered “cold fusion,” a way of producing excess heat and power without the nuclear radiation that accompanies “hot fusion.” Such a discovery could have great ramifications for the industrial production of energy, so these findings created a great deal of interest. When other scientists tried to duplicate the experiment, however, they didn’t achieve the same results, and as a result many wrote off the conclusions as unjustified (or worse, a hoax). To this day, the viability of cold fusion is debated within the scientific community, even though an increasing number of researchers believe it possible. So when you write your Methods section, keep in mind that you need to describe your experiment well enough to allow others to replicate it exactly.

With these goals in mind, let’s consider how to write an effective Methods section in terms of content, structure, and style.

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing this section isn’t what you should talk about, but what you shouldn’t talk about. Writers often want to include the results of their experiment, because they measured and recorded the results during the course of the experiment. But such data should be reserved for the Results section. In the Methods section, you can write that you recorded the results, or how you recorded the results (e.g., in a table), but you shouldn’t write what the results were—not yet. Here, you’re merely stating exactly how you went about testing your hypothesis. As you draft your Methods section, ask yourself the following questions:

• How much detail? Be precise in providing details, but stay relevant. Ask yourself, “Would it make any difference if this piece were a different size or made from a different material?” If not, you probably don’t need to get too specific. If so, you should give as many details as necessary to prevent this experiment from going awry if someone else tries to carry it out. Probably the most crucial detail is measurement; you should always quantify anything you can, such as time elapsed, temperature, mass, volume, etc.
• Rationale: Be sure that as you’re relating your actions during the experiment, you explain your rationale for the protocol you developed. If you capped a test tube immediately after adding a solute to a solvent, why did you do that? (That’s really two questions: why did you cap it, and why did you cap it immediately?) In a professional setting, writers provide their rationale as a way to explain their thinking to potential critics. On one hand, of course, that’s your motivation for talking about protocol, too. On the other hand, since in practical terms you’re also writing to your teacher (who’s seeking to evaluate how well you comprehend the principles of the experiment), explaining the rationale indicates that you understand the reasons for conducting the experiment in that way, and that you’re not just following orders. Critical thinking is crucial—robots don’t make good scientists.
• Control: Most experiments will include a control, which is a means of comparing experimental results. (Sometimes you’ll need to have more than one control, depending on the number of hypotheses you want to test.) The control is exactly the same as the other items you’re testing, except that you don’t manipulate the independent variable-the condition you’re altering to check the effect on the dependent variable. For example, if you’re testing solubility rates at increased temperatures, your control would be a solution that you didn’t heat at all; that way, you’ll see how quickly the solute dissolves “naturally” (i.e., without manipulation), and you’ll have a point of reference against which to compare the solutions you did heat.

Describe the control in the Methods section. Two things are especially important in writing about the control: identify the control as a control, and explain what you’re controlling for. Here is an example:

“As a control for the temperature change, we placed the same amount of solute in the same amount of solvent, and let the solution stand for five minutes without heating it.”

Structure and style

Organization is especially important in the Methods section of a lab report because readers must understand your experimental procedure completely. Many writers are surprised by the difficulty of conveying what they did during the experiment, since after all they’re only reporting an event, but it’s often tricky to present this information in a coherent way. There’s a fairly standard structure you can use to guide you, and following the conventions for style can help clarify your points.

• Subsections: Occasionally, researchers use subsections to report their procedure when the following circumstances apply: 1) if they’ve used a great many materials; 2) if the procedure is unusually complicated; 3) if they’ve developed a procedure that won’t be familiar to many of their readers. Because these conditions rarely apply to the experiments you’ll perform in class, most undergraduate lab reports won’t require you to use subsections. In fact, many guides to writing lab reports suggest that you try to limit your Methods section to a single paragraph.
• Narrative structure: Think of this section as telling a story about a group of people and the experiment they performed. Describe what you did in the order in which you did it. You may have heard the old joke centered on the line, “Disconnect the red wire, but only after disconnecting the green wire,” where the person reading the directions blows everything to kingdom come because the directions weren’t in order. We’re used to reading about events chronologically, and so your readers will generally understand what you did if you present that information in the same way. Also, since the Methods section does generally appear as a narrative (story), you want to avoid the “recipe” approach: “First, take a clean, dry 100 ml test tube from the rack. Next, add 50 ml of distilled water.” You should be reporting what did happen, not telling the reader how to perform the experiment: “50 ml of distilled water was poured into a clean, dry 100 ml test tube.” Hint: most of the time, the recipe approach comes from copying down the steps of the procedure from your lab manual, so you may want to draft the Methods section initially without consulting your manual. Later, of course, you can go back and fill in any part of the procedure you inadvertently overlooked.
• Past tense: Remember that you’re describing what happened, so you should use past tense to refer to everything you did during the experiment. Writers are often tempted to use the imperative (“Add 5 g of the solid to the solution”) because that’s how their lab manuals are worded; less frequently, they use present tense (“5 g of the solid are added to the solution”). Instead, remember that you’re talking about an event which happened at a particular time in the past, and which has already ended by the time you start writing, so simple past tense will be appropriate in this section (“5 g of the solid were added to the solution” or “We added 5 g of the solid to the solution”).
• Active: We heated the solution to 80°C. (The subject, “we,” performs the action, heating.)
• Passive: The solution was heated to 80°C. (The subject, “solution,” doesn’t do the heating–it is acted upon, not acting.)

Increasingly, especially in the social sciences, using first person and active voice is acceptable in scientific reports. Most readers find that this style of writing conveys information more clearly and concisely. This rhetorical choice thus brings two scientific values into conflict: objectivity versus clarity. Since the scientific community hasn’t reached a consensus about which style it prefers, you may want to ask your lab instructor.

How do I write a strong Results section?

Here’s a paradox for you. The Results section is often both the shortest (yay!) and most important (uh-oh!) part of your report. Your Materials and Methods section shows how you obtained the results, and your Discussion section explores the significance of the results, so clearly the Results section forms the backbone of the lab report. This section provides the most critical information about your experiment: the data that allow you to discuss how your hypothesis was or wasn’t supported. But it doesn’t provide anything else, which explains why this section is generally shorter than the others.

Before you write this section, look at all the data you collected to figure out what relates significantly to your hypothesis. You’ll want to highlight this material in your Results section. Resist the urge to include every bit of data you collected, since perhaps not all are relevant. Also, don’t try to draw conclusions about the results—save them for the Discussion section. In this section, you’re reporting facts. Nothing your readers can dispute should appear in the Results section.

Most Results sections feature three distinct parts: text, tables, and figures. Let’s consider each part one at a time.

This should be a short paragraph, generally just a few lines, that describes the results you obtained from your experiment. In a relatively simple experiment, one that doesn’t produce a lot of data for you to repeat, the text can represent the entire Results section. Don’t feel that you need to include lots of extraneous detail to compensate for a short (but effective) text; your readers appreciate discrimination more than your ability to recite facts. In a more complex experiment, you may want to use tables and/or figures to help guide your readers toward the most important information you gathered. In that event, you’ll need to refer to each table or figure directly, where appropriate:

“Table 1 lists the rates of solubility for each substance”

“Solubility increased as the temperature of the solution increased (see Figure 1).”

If you do use tables or figures, make sure that you don’t present the same material in both the text and the tables/figures, since in essence you’ll just repeat yourself, probably annoying your readers with the redundancy of your statements.

Feel free to describe trends that emerge as you examine the data. Although identifying trends requires some judgment on your part and so may not feel like factual reporting, no one can deny that these trends do exist, and so they properly belong in the Results section. Example:

“Heating the solution increased the rate of solubility of polar solids by 45% but had no effect on the rate of solubility in solutions containing non-polar solids.”

This point isn’t debatable—you’re just pointing out what the data show.

As in the Materials and Methods section, you want to refer to your data in the past tense, because the events you recorded have already occurred and have finished occurring. In the example above, note the use of “increased” and “had,” rather than “increases” and “has.” (You don’t know from your experiment that heating always increases the solubility of polar solids, but it did that time.)

You shouldn’t put information in the table that also appears in the text. You also shouldn’t use a table to present irrelevant data, just to show you did collect these data during the experiment. Tables are good for some purposes and situations, but not others, so whether and how you’ll use tables depends upon what you need them to accomplish.

Tables are useful ways to show variation in data, but not to present a great deal of unchanging measurements. If you’re dealing with a scientific phenomenon that occurs only within a certain range of temperatures, for example, you don’t need to use a table to show that the phenomenon didn’t occur at any of the other temperatures. How useful is this table?

As you can probably see, no solubility was observed until the trial temperature reached 50°C, a fact that the text part of the Results section could easily convey. The table could then be limited to what happened at 50°C and higher, thus better illustrating the differences in solubility rates when solubility did occur.

As a rule, try not to use a table to describe any experimental event you can cover in one sentence of text. Here’s an example of an unnecessary table from How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper , by Robert A. Day:

As Day notes, all the information in this table can be summarized in one sentence: “S. griseus, S. coelicolor, S. everycolor, and S. rainbowenski grew under aerobic conditions, whereas S. nocolor and S. greenicus required anaerobic conditions.” Most readers won’t find the table clearer than that one sentence.

When you do have reason to tabulate material, pay attention to the clarity and readability of the format you use. Here are a few tips:

• Number your table. Then, when you refer to the table in the text, use that number to tell your readers which table they can review to clarify the material.
• Give your table a title. This title should be descriptive enough to communicate the contents of the table, but not so long that it becomes difficult to follow. The titles in the sample tables above are acceptable.
• Arrange your table so that readers read vertically, not horizontally. For the most part, this rule means that you should construct your table so that like elements read down, not across. Think about what you want your readers to compare, and put that information in the column (up and down) rather than in the row (across). Usually, the point of comparison will be the numerical data you collect, so especially make sure you have columns of numbers, not rows.Here’s an example of how drastically this decision affects the readability of your table (from A Short Guide to Writing about Chemistry , by Herbert Beall and John Trimbur). Look at this table, which presents the relevant data in horizontal rows:

It’s a little tough to see the trends that the author presumably wants to present in this table. Compare this table, in which the data appear vertically:

The second table shows how putting like elements in a vertical column makes for easier reading. In this case, the like elements are the measurements of length and height, over five trials–not, as in the first table, the length and height measurements for each trial.

• Make sure to include units of measurement in the tables. Readers might be able to guess that you measured something in millimeters, but don’t make them try.

• Don’t use vertical lines as part of the format for your table. This convention exists because journals prefer not to have to reproduce these lines because the tables then become more expensive to print. Even though it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll be sending your Biology 11 lab report to Science for publication, your readers still have this expectation. Consequently, if you use the table-drawing option in your word-processing software, choose the option that doesn’t rely on a “grid” format (which includes vertical lines).

How do I include figures in my report?

Although tables can be useful ways of showing trends in the results you obtained, figures (i.e., illustrations) can do an even better job of emphasizing such trends. Lab report writers often use graphic representations of the data they collected to provide their readers with a literal picture of how the experiment went.

When should you use a figure?

Remember the circumstances under which you don’t need a table: when you don’t have a great deal of data or when the data you have don’t vary a lot. Under the same conditions, you would probably forgo the figure as well, since the figure would be unlikely to provide your readers with an additional perspective. Scientists really don’t like their time wasted, so they tend not to respond favorably to redundancy.

If you’re trying to decide between using a table and creating a figure to present your material, consider the following a rule of thumb. The strength of a table lies in its ability to supply large amounts of exact data, whereas the strength of a figure is its dramatic illustration of important trends within the experiment. If you feel that your readers won’t get the full impact of the results you obtained just by looking at the numbers, then a figure might be appropriate.

Of course, an undergraduate class may expect you to create a figure for your lab experiment, if only to make sure that you can do so effectively. If this is the case, then don’t worry about whether to use figures or not—concentrate instead on how best to accomplish your task.

Figures can include maps, photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, flow charts, bar graphs, and section graphs (“pie charts”). But the most common figure by far, especially for undergraduates, is the line graph, so we’ll focus on that type in this handout.

At the undergraduate level, you can often draw and label your graphs by hand, provided that the result is clear, legible, and drawn to scale. Computer technology has, however, made creating line graphs a lot easier. Most word-processing software has a number of functions for transferring data into graph form; many scientists have found Microsoft Excel, for example, a helpful tool in graphing results. If you plan on pursuing a career in the sciences, it may be well worth your while to learn to use a similar program.

Computers can’t, however, decide for you how your graph really works; you have to know how to design your graph to meet your readers’ expectations. Here are some of these expectations:

• Keep it as simple as possible. You may be tempted to signal the complexity of the information you gathered by trying to design a graph that accounts for that complexity. But remember the purpose of your graph: to dramatize your results in a manner that’s easy to see and grasp. Try not to make the reader stare at the graph for a half hour to find the important line among the mass of other lines. For maximum effectiveness, limit yourself to three to five lines per graph; if you have more data to demonstrate, use a set of graphs to account for it, rather than trying to cram it all into a single figure.
• Plot the independent variable on the horizontal (x) axis and the dependent variable on the vertical (y) axis. Remember that the independent variable is the condition that you manipulated during the experiment and the dependent variable is the condition that you measured to see if it changed along with the independent variable. Placing the variables along their respective axes is mostly just a convention, but since your readers are accustomed to viewing graphs in this way, you’re better off not challenging the convention in your report.
• Label each axis carefully, and be especially careful to include units of measure. You need to make sure that your readers understand perfectly well what your graph indicates.
• Number and title your graphs. As with tables, the title of the graph should be informative but concise, and you should refer to your graph by number in the text (e.g., “Figure 1 shows the increase in the solubility rate as a function of temperature”).
• Many editors of professional scientific journals prefer that writers distinguish the lines in their graphs by attaching a symbol to them, usually a geometric shape (triangle, square, etc.), and using that symbol throughout the curve of the line. Generally, readers have a hard time distinguishing dotted lines from dot-dash lines from straight lines, so you should consider staying away from this system. Editors don’t usually like different-colored lines within a graph because colors are difficult and expensive to reproduce; colors may, however, be great for your purposes, as long as you’re not planning to submit your paper to Nature. Use your discretion—try to employ whichever technique dramatizes the results most effectively.
• Try to gather data at regular intervals, so the plot points on your graph aren’t too far apart. You can’t be sure of the arc you should draw between the plot points if the points are located at the far corners of the graph; over a fifteen-minute interval, perhaps the change occurred in the first or last thirty seconds of that period (in which case your straight-line connection between the points is misleading).
• If you’re worried that you didn’t collect data at sufficiently regular intervals during your experiment, go ahead and connect the points with a straight line, but you may want to examine this problem as part of your Discussion section.
• Make your graph large enough so that everything is legible and clearly demarcated, but not so large that it either overwhelms the rest of the Results section or provides a far greater range than you need to illustrate your point. If, for example, the seedlings of your plant grew only 15 mm during the trial, you don’t need to construct a graph that accounts for 100 mm of growth. The lines in your graph should more or less fill the space created by the axes; if you see that your data is confined to the lower left portion of the graph, you should probably re-adjust your scale.
• If you create a set of graphs, make them the same size and format, including all the verbal and visual codes (captions, symbols, scale, etc.). You want to be as consistent as possible in your illustrations, so that your readers can easily make the comparisons you’re trying to get them to see.

How do I write a strong Discussion section?

The discussion section is probably the least formalized part of the report, in that you can’t really apply the same structure to every type of experiment. In simple terms, here you tell your readers what to make of the Results you obtained. If you have done the Results part well, your readers should already recognize the trends in the data and have a fairly clear idea of whether your hypothesis was supported. Because the Results can seem so self-explanatory, many students find it difficult to know what material to add in this last section.

Basically, the Discussion contains several parts, in no particular order, but roughly moving from specific (i.e., related to your experiment only) to general (how your findings fit in the larger scientific community). In this section, you will, as a rule, need to:

Explain whether the data support your hypothesis

• Acknowledge any anomalous data or deviations from what you expected

Derive conclusions, based on your findings, about the process you’re studying

• Relate your findings to earlier work in the same area (if you can)

Explore the theoretical and/or practical implications of your findings

Let’s look at some dos and don’ts for each of these objectives.

This statement is usually a good way to begin the Discussion, since you can’t effectively speak about the larger scientific value of your study until you’ve figured out the particulars of this experiment. You might begin this part of the Discussion by explicitly stating the relationships or correlations your data indicate between the independent and dependent variables. Then you can show more clearly why you believe your hypothesis was or was not supported. For example, if you tested solubility at various temperatures, you could start this section by noting that the rates of solubility increased as the temperature increased. If your initial hypothesis surmised that temperature change would not affect solubility, you would then say something like,

“The hypothesis that temperature change would not affect solubility was not supported by the data.”

Note: Students tend to view labs as practical tests of undeniable scientific truths. As a result, you may want to say that the hypothesis was “proved” or “disproved” or that it was “correct” or “incorrect.” These terms, however, reflect a degree of certainty that you as a scientist aren’t supposed to have. Remember, you’re testing a theory with a procedure that lasts only a few hours and relies on only a few trials, which severely compromises your ability to be sure about the “truth” you see. Words like “supported,” “indicated,” and “suggested” are more acceptable ways to evaluate your hypothesis.

Also, recognize that saying whether the data supported your hypothesis or not involves making a claim to be defended. As such, you need to show the readers that this claim is warranted by the evidence. Make sure that you’re very explicit about the relationship between the evidence and the conclusions you draw from it. This process is difficult for many writers because we don’t often justify conclusions in our regular lives. For example, you might nudge your friend at a party and whisper, “That guy’s drunk,” and once your friend lays eyes on the person in question, she might readily agree. In a scientific paper, by contrast, you would need to defend your claim more thoroughly by pointing to data such as slurred words, unsteady gait, and the lampshade-as-hat. In addition to pointing out these details, you would also need to show how (according to previous studies) these signs are consistent with inebriation, especially if they occur in conjunction with one another. To put it another way, tell your readers exactly how you got from point A (was the hypothesis supported?) to point B (yes/no).

Acknowledge any anomalous data, or deviations from what you expected

You need to take these exceptions and divergences into account, so that you qualify your conclusions sufficiently. For obvious reasons, your readers will doubt your authority if you (deliberately or inadvertently) overlook a key piece of data that doesn’t square with your perspective on what occurred. In a more philosophical sense, once you’ve ignored evidence that contradicts your claims, you’ve departed from the scientific method. The urge to “tidy up” the experiment is often strong, but if you give in to it you’re no longer performing good science.

Sometimes after you’ve performed a study or experiment, you realize that some part of the methods you used to test your hypothesis was flawed. In that case, it’s OK to suggest that if you had the chance to conduct your test again, you might change the design in this or that specific way in order to avoid such and such a problem. The key to making this approach work, though, is to be very precise about the weakness in your experiment, why and how you think that weakness might have affected your data, and how you would alter your protocol to eliminate—or limit the effects of—that weakness. Often, inexperienced researchers and writers feel the need to account for “wrong” data (remember, there’s no such animal), and so they speculate wildly about what might have screwed things up. These speculations include such factors as the unusually hot temperature in the room, or the possibility that their lab partners read the meters wrong, or the potentially defective equipment. These explanations are what scientists call “cop-outs,” or “lame”; don’t indicate that the experiment had a weakness unless you’re fairly certain that a) it really occurred and b) you can explain reasonably well how that weakness affected your results.

If, for example, your hypothesis dealt with the changes in solubility at different temperatures, then try to figure out what you can rationally say about the process of solubility more generally. If you’re doing an undergraduate lab, chances are that the lab will connect in some way to the material you’ve been covering either in lecture or in your reading, so you might choose to return to these resources as a way to help you think clearly about the process as a whole.

This part of the Discussion section is another place where you need to make sure that you’re not overreaching. Again, nothing you’ve found in one study would remotely allow you to claim that you now “know” something, or that something isn’t “true,” or that your experiment “confirmed” some principle or other. Hesitate before you go out on a limb—it’s dangerous! Use less absolutely conclusive language, including such words as “suggest,” “indicate,” “correspond,” “possibly,” “challenge,” etc.

Relate your findings to previous work in the field (if possible)

We’ve been talking about how to show that you belong in a particular community (such as biologists or anthropologists) by writing within conventions that they recognize and accept. Another is to try to identify a conversation going on among members of that community, and use your work to contribute to that conversation. In a larger philosophical sense, scientists can’t fully understand the value of their research unless they have some sense of the context that provoked and nourished it. That is, you have to recognize what’s new about your project (potentially, anyway) and how it benefits the wider body of scientific knowledge. On a more pragmatic level, especially for undergraduates, connecting your lab work to previous research will demonstrate to the TA that you see the big picture. You have an opportunity, in the Discussion section, to distinguish yourself from the students in your class who aren’t thinking beyond the barest facts of the study. Capitalize on this opportunity by putting your own work in context.

If you’re just beginning to work in the natural sciences (as a first-year biology or chemistry student, say), most likely the work you’ll be doing has already been performed and re-performed to a satisfactory degree. Hence, you could probably point to a similar experiment or study and compare/contrast your results and conclusions. More advanced work may deal with an issue that is somewhat less “resolved,” and so previous research may take the form of an ongoing debate, and you can use your own work to weigh in on that debate. If, for example, researchers are hotly disputing the value of herbal remedies for the common cold, and the results of your study suggest that Echinacea diminishes the symptoms but not the actual presence of the cold, then you might want to take some time in the Discussion section to recapitulate the specifics of the dispute as it relates to Echinacea as an herbal remedy. (Consider that you have probably already written in the Introduction about this debate as background research.)

This information is often the best way to end your Discussion (and, for all intents and purposes, the report). In argumentative writing generally, you want to use your closing words to convey the main point of your writing. This main point can be primarily theoretical (“Now that you understand this information, you’re in a better position to understand this larger issue”) or primarily practical (“You can use this information to take such and such an action”). In either case, the concluding statements help the reader to comprehend the significance of your project and your decision to write about it.

Since a lab report is argumentative—after all, you’re investigating a claim, and judging the legitimacy of that claim by generating and collecting evidence—it’s often a good idea to end your report with the same technique for establishing your main point. If you want to go the theoretical route, you might talk about the consequences your study has for the field or phenomenon you’re investigating. To return to the examples regarding solubility, you could end by reflecting on what your work on solubility as a function of temperature tells us (potentially) about solubility in general. (Some folks consider this type of exploration “pure” as opposed to “applied” science, although these labels can be problematic.) If you want to go the practical route, you could end by speculating about the medical, institutional, or commercial implications of your findings—in other words, answer the question, “What can this study help people to do?” In either case, you’re going to make your readers’ experience more satisfying, by helping them see why they spent their time learning what you had to teach them.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

American Psychological Association. 2010. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . 6th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Beall, Herbert, and John Trimbur. 2001. A Short Guide to Writing About Chemistry , 2nd ed. New York: Longman.

Blum, Deborah, and Mary Knudson. 1997. A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers . New York: Oxford University Press.

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald. 2016. The Craft of Research , 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Briscoe, Mary Helen. 1996. Preparing Scientific Illustrations: A Guide to Better Posters, Presentations, and Publications , 2nd ed. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Council of Science Editors. 2014. Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers , 8th ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Davis, Martha. 2012. Scientific Papers and Presentations , 3rd ed. London: Academic Press.

Day, Robert A. 1994. How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper , 4th ed. Phoenix: Oryx Press.

Porush, David. 1995. A Short Guide to Writing About Science . New York: Longman.

Williams, Joseph, and Joseph Bizup. 2017. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace , 12th ed. Boston: Pearson.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Tips on How to Write a Lab Report: A Full Guide

What Is a Lab Report

Let's start with a burning question: what is lab report? A lab report is an overview of your scientific experiment. It describes what you did (the course of the experiment), how you did it (what equipment and materials you used), and what outcome your experiment led to.

If you take any science classes involving a lab experiment – or full-fledged laboratory courses, you'll have to do your share of lab report writing.

Unlike the format of case study writing , lab reports have to follow a different structure. They, along with other lab report guidelines, are likely defined by your instructor. Your lab notebook may also contain the requirements.

But if it's not your case, here's what to include in a lab report:

• title page;
• introduction;
• equipment and materials list;
• conclusion;
• appendices.

If this structure looks intimidating now, don't worry: we'll break down every component below.

Format for Lab Reports

Different instructors require different formats for lab reports. So, look through the requirements you've received and see if a science lab report format is specified.

If no format is specified, see if your school, college, or university has specific formatting guidelines or a lab report template to follow.

If that's also not the case, then you can choose the most common formatting style for research papers and lab reports alike: the APA (American Psychology Association) format. Other options include the MLA (Modern Language Association) and Chicago styles.

APA Lab Report Style

Let's break down the main particularities of using the APA style for lab reports. When it comes to the lab report outline, this style dictates that you should include the following:

• a title page;
• an abstract;
• sources (as a References page).

How to format references under the APA format deserves a separate blog post. But here's a short example:

Smith, J. (2021). A lab report introduction guide. Cambridge Press.

To cite this source in the text, style it like this: (Smith, 2021)

As for the text formatting, here are the key APA guidelines to keep in mind:

• page margins: 1" (on all sides);
• indent: 0.5";
• page number: in the upper right corner;
• spacing: double;
• font: Times New Roman 12 pt.

How Long Should a Lab Report Be?

The appropriate report length depends heavily on the kind of experiment conducted – and on the requirements set by your instructor. That said, most lab reports are five to ten pages long, in our experience. That includes all the raw data, appendices, and graphs.

Need a lab report example? You'll find three below!

What's the Difference Between Lab Reports & Research Papers?

While lab report format and structure are similar to that of a research paper, they differ. But unfortunately, in our work as a college essay writing service , we see them confused often enough.

The key differences between lab reports and research papers are:

• Lab reports require you to conduct a hands-on experiment, while research papers are focused on the interpretation of existing data;
• A lab report's purpose is to show that you understand the scientific methods central to the experimental procedure – that's why the lab report template is different, too;
• A lab experiment doesn't require you to have an original hypothesis or argument;
• Research papers are usually longer than lab reports.

How to Do a Lab Report: Outline

Like with any other papers, from SWOT analysis to case studies, writing lab reports is easier when you have a clear college lab report outline in front of you. Luckily for you, the lab report structure is the same in most cases.

So, here's how to do a lab report – follow this outline (unless your instructor's requirements contradict it!):

• Title page: your name, course, instructor, and the report title;
• Abstract: a short description of the key findings and their significance;
• Introduction: the purpose of the lab experiment and its background information;
• Methods and materials: what you used during the experiment (e.g., a lab manual, certain reagents, etc.);
• Procedure: the detailed description of the lab experiment;
• Results: the outcome of your experiment and its interpretation;
• Conclusion: what your findings may mean for the field;
• References: the list of your sources;
• Appendices: raw data, calculations, graphs, etc.

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Guide on How to Write a Lab Report

If the outline above is overwhelming at first, don't worry! As a paper and essay writing service , we've had our share of experience in writing lab reports. Today, we'd like to share this experience with you in this lab report guide.

So, below you'll find everything you need to know on how to write a good lab report, along with handy lab report guidelines!

Lab Report Title Page

The lab report title page should include your name, student code, and any lab partners you may have had. It should also contain the date of the experiment and the title of your report.

The title length should be less than ten words. You'll also need to include the name of the academic supervisor in your lab report title page if you have one.

This paragraph describes your experiment, its main point, and its findings in a nutshell. Here are several guidelines on how to write an abstract for a lab report:

• Keep it under 200 words;
• Start with the purpose of your experiment;
• Describe the experimental procedure;
• State the results;
• Include 2-3 keywords (optional).

Lab Report Introduction

The first paragraph is where you explain your hypothesis and the purpose of your experiment. You can also add any previous research on the matter and any background information worth including. Here's a short lab report introduction example with a hypothesis:

This experiment examined the correlation between the levels of CO2 and the rate of photosynthesis in Chlorella algae. The latter was quantified by measuring the levels of RuBisCO.

Equipment (Methods and Materials)

Next in the lab report structure is the equipment section (also known as methods and materials). This is where you mention your lab manual, methods used during the experimental procedure, and the materials list.

In this part of the report, ensure to include all the details of the experimental procedure. It should provide readers with everything they need to know to replicate your study.

Procedure (with Graphs & Figures)

This part is, perhaps, the easiest (unlike how to write a hypothesis for a lab report). You should simply document the course of the lab experiment step-by-step, in chronological order.

This is usually a significant part of the report, taking up most of it. So make sure to provide detailed information on your hands-on experience!

Results Section

This is the overview of your experiment's findings (also known as the discussion section). Here's how to write a results section for a lab report:

• Discuss the outcome of the experiment;
• Explain how it pertains to your hypothesis (whether it proves or disproves it);
• Keep it brief and concise.

Note . You might notice that describing future work or further studies is absent from the tips on how to write the discussion section of a lab report. That's because it's a part of the conclusion, not the discussion.

This is where you sum up the results of your experiment and draw any major conclusions. You may also suggest future laboratory experiments or further research.

Here's how to write a conclusion for a lab report in three steps:

• Explain the results of your experiment;
• Determine their significance – and any limitations to the experimental design;
• Suggest future studies (if applicable).

The conclusion part of lab reports is typically short. So, don't worry if you can't write a lengthy one – you don't have to!

This is the part of your lab report outline where you list all of the sources you relied on in your lab experiments. It should include your lab manual, along with any relevant recommended reading from your course. You may also include any extra sources you used.

Remember to format your references list according to the formatting style you have to follow. Apart from every entry's formatting, you'll also have to present your references in alphabetical order based on the author's last name (for APA lab reports).

Finally, any lab report format includes appendices – your figures and graphs, in other words. This is where you add your raw data in tables, complete calculations, charts, etc.

Keep in mind: just like with sources, you need to cite each of the appendices in the main body of the report. Remember to format the appendix and its citation according to the chosen formatting style.

Lab Report Examples

As a paper and dissertation writing service , we know that sometimes it's better to see a great example of how to write a lab report once than to read dozens of tips. So, we've asked our lab report writing service to prepare a lab report template for three disciplines: chemistry, biology, and science.

Look at these samples if you keep wondering how to do a lab report! But keep in mind: you won't be able to use them as-is. So instead, use them as examples for your writing.

Note . References to lab manuals are made up – you should refer to the one you use in the experiment!

How to Write a Formal Lab Report for Chemistry?

The same lab report guidelines listed above apply to chemistry lab reports. Here's a short example that includes a lab report introduction, equipment, procedure, results, and references for an electrolysis reaction.

How to Write a Lab Report for Biology?

Next up in your lab report guide, it's a biology lab report! Like in any other lab report, its main point is to describe your experiment and explain its findings. Below you can find an example of one biology lab report that seeks to explain how to extract DNA from sliced fruit and make it visible to the naked eye.

How to Write a Science Lab Report?

Finally, let's look at a general science lab report. In this case, the science lab report format is the same as for other disciplines: start with the introduction and hypothesis, describe the equipment and procedure, and explain the outcome.

Here's a science lab report example on testing the density of different juices.

7 More Tips on How to Write a Lab Report

Need some more guidance on writing lab reports? Then, we've got you covered! Here are seven more tips on writing an excellent report:

• Carefully examine your lab manual before starting the experiment;
• Take detailed notes throughout the process;
• Be conscious of any limitations of your experimental design – and mention them in conclusion;
• Stick to the lab report structure defined by your instructor;
• Be transparent about any experimental error that may occur;
• Search for examples if you feel stuck with writing lab reports;
• Triple-check your lab report before submitting it: look for formatting issues, sources forgotten, and grammar and syntax mistakes.

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America's Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science (2006)

Chapter: 1 introduction, history, and definition of laboratories, 1 introduction, history, and definition of laboratories.

Science laboratories have been part of high school education for two centuries, yet a clear articulation of their role in student learning of science remains elusive. This report evaluates the evidence about the role of laboratories in helping students attain science learning goals and discusses factors that currently limit science learning in high school laboratories. In this chap-

ter, the committee presents its charge, reviews the history of science laboratories in U.S. high schools, defines laboratories, and outlines the organization of the report.

CHARGE TO THE COMMITTEE

In the National Science Foundation (NSF) Authorization Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-368, authorizing funding for fiscal years 2003-2007), Congress called on NSF to launch a secondary school systemic initiative. The initiative was to “promote scientific and technological literacy” and to “meet the mathematics and science needs of students at risk of not achieving State student academic achievement standards.” Congress directed NSF to provide grants for such activities as “laboratory improvement and provision of instrumentation as part of a comprehensive program to enhance the quality of mathematics, science, engineering, and technology instruction” (P.L. 107-368, Section 8-E). In response, NSF turned to the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. NSF requested that the NRC

nominate a committee to review the status of and future directions for the role of high school science laboratories in promoting the teaching and learning of science for all students. This committee will guide the conduct of a study and author a consensus report that will provide guidance on the question of the role and purpose of high school science laboratories with an emphasis on future directions…. Among the questions that may guide these activities are:

What is the current state of science laboratories and what do we know about how they are used in high schools?

What examples or alternatives are there to traditional approaches to labs and what is the evidence base as to their effectiveness?

If labs in high school never existed (i.e., if they were to be planned and designed de novo), what would that experience look like now, given modern advances in the natural and learning sciences?

In what ways can the integration of technologies into the curriculum augment and extend a new vision of high school science labs? What is known about high school science labs based on principles of design?

How do the structures and policies of high schools (course scheduling, curricular design, textbook adoption, and resource deployment) influence the organization of science labs? What kinds of changes might be needed in the infrastructure of high schools to enhance the effectiveness of science labs?

What are the costs (e.g., financial, personnel, space, scheduling) associated with different models of high school science labs? How might a new vision of laboratory experiences for high school students influence those costs?

In what way does the growing interdisciplinary nature of the work of scientists help to shape discussions of laboratories as contexts in high school for science learning?

How do high school lab experiences align with both middle school and postsecondary education? How is the role of teaching labs changing in the nation’s colleges and universities? Would a redesign of high school science labs enhance or limit articulation between high school and college-level science education?

The NRC convened the Committee on High School Science Laboratories: Role and Vision to address this charge.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The committee carried out its charge through an iterative process of gathering information, deliberating on it, identifying gaps and questions, gathering further information to fill these gaps, and holding further discussions. In the search for relevant information, the committee held three public fact-finding meetings, reviewed published reports and unpublished research, searched the Internet, and commissioned experts to prepare and present papers. At a fourth, private meeting, the committee intensely analyzed and discussed its findings and conclusions over the course of three days. Although the committee considered information from a variety of sources, its final report gives most weight to research published in peer-reviewed journals and books.

At an early stage in its deliberations, the committee chose to focus primarily on “the role of high school laboratories in promoting the teaching and learning of science for all students.” The committee soon became frustrated by the limited research evidence on the role of laboratories in learning. To address one of many problems in the research evidence—a lack of agreement about what constitutes a laboratory and about the purposes of laboratory education—the committee commissioned a paper to analyze the alternative definitions and goals of laboratories.

The committee developed a concept map outlining the main themes of the study (see Figure 1-1 ) and organized the three fact-finding meetings to gather information on each of these themes. For example, reflecting the committee’s focus on student learning (“how students learn science” on the concept map), all three fact-finding meetings included researchers who had developed innovative approaches to high school science laboratories. We also commissioned two experts to present papers reviewing available research on the role of laboratories in students’ learning of science.

At the fact-finding meetings, some researchers presented evidence of student learning following exposure to sequences of instruction that included laboratory experiences; others provided data on how various technologies

FIGURE 1-1 High school science laboratory experiences: Role and vision. Concept map with references to guiding questions in committee charge.

contribute to student learning in the laboratory. Responding to the congressional mandate to meet the mathematics and science needs of students at risk of not achieving state student academic achievement standards, the third fact-finding meeting included researchers who have studied laboratory teaching and learning among diverse students. Taken together, all of these activities enabled the committee to address questions 2, 3, and 4 of the charge.

The committee took several steps to ensure that the study reflected the current realities of science laboratories in U.S high schools, addressing the themes of “how science teachers learn and work” and “constraints and enablers of laboratory experiences” on the concept map. At the first fact-finding meeting, representatives of associations of scientists and science teachers described their efforts to help science teachers learn to lead effective labora-

tory activities. They noted constraints on laboratory learning, including poorly designed, overcrowded laboratory classrooms and inadequate preparation of science teachers. This first meeting also included a presentation about laboratory scheduling, supplies, and equipment drawn from a national survey of science teachers conducted in 2000. At the second fact-finding meeting, an architect spoke about the design of laboratory facilities, and a sociologist described how the organization of work and authority in schools may enable or constrain innovative approaches to laboratory teaching. Two meetings included panel discussions about laboratory teaching among groups of science teachers and school administrators. Through these presentations, review of additional literature, and internal discussions, the committee was able to respond to questions 1, 5, and 6 of the charge. The agendas for each fact-finding meeting, including the guiding questions that were sent to each presenter, appear in Appendix A .

The committee recognized that the question in its charge about the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of science (question 7) is important to the future of science and to high school science laboratories. In presentations and commissioned papers, several experts offered suggestions for how laboratory activities could be designed to more accurately reflect the work of scientists and to improve students’ understanding of the way scientists work today. Based on our analysis of this information, the committee partially addresses this question from the perspective of how scientists conduct their work (in this chapter). The committee also identifies design principles for laboratory activities that may increase students’ understanding of the nature of science (in Chapter 3 ). However, in order to maintain our focus on the key question of student learning in laboratories, the committee did not fully address question 7.

Another important question in the committee’s charge (question 8) addresses the alignment of laboratory learning in middle school, high school, and undergraduate science education. Within the short time frame of this study, the committee focused on identifying, assembling, and analyzing the limited research available on high school science laboratories and did not attempt to do the same analysis for middle school and undergraduate science laboratories. However, this report does discuss several studies of student laboratory learning in middle school (see Chapter 3 ) and describes undergraduate science laboratories briefly in its analysis of the preparation of high school science teachers (see in Chapter 5 ). The committee thinks questions about the alignment of laboratory learning merit more sustained attention than was possible in this study.

During the course of our deliberations, other important questions emerged. For example, it is apparent that the scientific community is engaged in an array of efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in high school science laboratories, but little information is available on the extent

of these efforts and on their effectiveness at enhancing student learning. As a result, we address the role of the scientific community in high school laboratories only briefly in Chapters 1 and 5 . Another issue that arose over the course of this study is laboratory safety. We became convinced that laboratory safety is critical, but we did not fully analyze safety issues, which lay outside our charge. Finally, although engaging students in design or engineering laboratory activities appears to hold promising connections with science laboratory activities, the committee did not explore this possibility. Although all of these issues and questions are important, taking time and energy to address them would have deterred us from a central focus on the role of high school laboratories in promoting the teaching and learning of science for all students.

One important step in defining the scope of the study was to review the history of laboratories. Examining the history of laboratory education helped to illuminate persistent tensions, provided insight into approaches to be avoided in the future, and allowed the committee to more clearly frame key questions for the future.

HISTORY OF LABORATORY EDUCATION

The history of laboratories in U.S. high schools has been affected by changing views of the nature of science and by society’s changing goals for science education. Between 1850 and the present, educators, scientists, and the public have, at different times, placed more or less emphasis on three sometimes-competing goals for school science education: (1) a theoretical emphasis, stressing the structure of scientific disciplines, the benefits of basic scientific research, and the importance of preparing young people for higher education in science; (2) an applied or practical emphasis, stressing high school students’ ability to understand and apply the science and workings of everyday things; and (3) a liberal or contextual emphasis, stressing the historical development and cultural implications of science (Matthews, 1994). These changing goals have affected the nature and extent of laboratory education.

By the mid-19th century, British writers and philosophers had articulated a view of science as an inductive process (Mill, 1843; Whewell, 1840, 1858). They believed that scientists engaged in painstaking observation of nature to identify and accumulate facts, and only very cautiously did they draw conclusions from these facts to propose new theories. British and American scientists portrayed the newest scientific discoveries—such as the laws of thermodynamics and Darwin’s theory of evolution—to an increas-

ingly interested public as certain knowledge derived through well-established inductive methods. However, scientists and teachers made few efforts to teach students about these methods. High school and undergraduate science courses, like those in history and other subjects, were taught through lectures and textbooks, followed by rote memorization and recitation (Rudolph, 2005). Lecturers emphasized student knowledge of the facts, and science laboratories were not yet accepted as part of higher education. For example, when Benjamin Silliman set up the first chemistry laboratory at Yale in 1847, he paid rent to the college for use of the building and equipped it at his own expense (Whitman, 1898, p. 201). Few students were allowed into these laboratories, which were reserved for scientists’ research, although some apparatus from the laboratory was occasionally brought into the lecture room for demonstrations.

During the 1880s, the situation changed rapidly. Influenced by the example of chemist Justus von Liebig in Germany, leading American universities embraced the German model. In this model, laboratories played a central role as the setting for faculty research and for advanced scientific study by students. Johns Hopkins University established itself as a research institution with student laboratories. Other leading colleges and universities followed suit, and high schools—which were just being established as educational institutions—soon began to create student science laboratories as well.

The primary goal of these early high school laboratories was to prepare students for higher science education in college and university laboratories. The National Education Association produced an influential report noting the “absolute necessity of laboratory work” in the high school science curriculum (National Education Association, 1894) in order to prepare students for undergraduate science studies. As demand for secondary school teachers trained in laboratory methods grew, colleges and universities began offering summer laboratory courses for teachers. In 1895, a zoology professor at Brown University described “large and increasing attendance at our summer schools,” which focused on the dissection of cats and other animals (Bump, 1895, p. 260).

In these early years, American educators emphasized the theoretical, disciplinary goals of science education in order to prepare graduates for further science education. Because of this emphasis, high schools quickly embraced a detailed list of 40 physics experiments published by Harvard instructor Edwin Hall (Harvard University, 1889). The list outlined the experiments, procedures, and equipment necessary to successfully complete all 40 experiments as a condition of admission to study physics at Harvard. Scientific supply companies began selling complete sets of the required equipment to schools and successful completion of the exercises was soon required for admission to study physics at other colleges and universities (Rudolph, 2005).

At that time, most educators and scientists believed that participating in laboratory experiments would help students learn methods of accurate observation and inductive reasoning. However, the focus on prescribing specific experiments and procedures, illustrated by the embrace of the Harvard list, limited the effectiveness of early laboratory education. In the rush to specify laboratory experiments, procedures, and equipment, little attention had been paid to how students might learn from these experiences. Students were expected to simply absorb the methods of inductive reasoning by carrying out experiments according to prescribed procedures (Rudolph, 2005).

Between 1890 and 1910, as U.S. high schools expanded rapidly to absorb a huge influx of new students, a backlash began to develop against the prevailing approach to laboratory education. In a 1901 lecture at the New England Association of College and Secondary Schools, G. Stanley Hall, one of the first American psychologists, criticized high school physics education based on the Harvard list, saying that “boys of this age … want more dynamic physics” (Hall, 1901). Building on Hall’s critique, University of Chicago physicist Charles Mann and other members of the Central Association for Science and Mathematics Teaching launched a complete overhaul of high school physics teaching. Mann and others attacked the “dry bones” of the Harvard experiments, calling for a high school physics curriculum with more personal and social relevance to students. One described lab work as “at best a very artificial means of supplying experiences upon which to build physical concepts” (Woodhull, 1909). Other educators argued that science teaching could be improved by providing more historical perspective, and high schools began reducing the number of laboratory exercises.

By 1910, a clear tension had emerged between those emphasizing laboratory experiments and reformers favoring an emphasis on interesting, practical science content in high school science. However, the focus on content also led to problems, as students became overwhelmed with “interesting” facts. New York’s experience illustrates this tension. In 1890, the New York State Regents exam included questions asking students to design experiments (Champagne and Shiland, 2004). In 1905, the state introduced a new syllabus of physics topics. The content to be covered was so extensive that, over the course of a year, an average of half an hour could be devoted to each topic, virtually eliminating the possibility of including laboratory activities (Matthews, 1994). An outcry to return to more experimentation in science courses resulted, and in 1910 New York State instituted a requirement for 30 science laboratory sessions taking double periods in the syllabus for Regents science courses (courses preparing students for the New York State Regents examinations) (Champagne and Shiland, 2004).

In an influential speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1909, philosopher and educator John Dewey proposed a solution to the tension between advocates for more laboratory

experimentation and advocates for science education emphasizing practical content. While criticizing science teaching focused strictly on covering large amounts of known content, Dewey also pointed to the flaws in rigid laboratory exercises: “A student may acquire laboratory methods as so much isolated and final stuff, just as he may so acquire material from a textbook…. Many a student had acquired dexterity and skill in laboratory methods without it ever occurring to him that they have anything to do with constructing beliefs that are alone worthy of the title of knowledge” (Dewey, 1910b). Dewey believed that people should leave school with some understanding of the kinds of evidence required to substantiate scientific beliefs. However, he never explicitly described his view of the process by which scientists develop and substantiate such evidence.

In 1910, Dewey wrote a short textbook aimed at helping teachers deal with students as individuals despite rapidly growing enrollments. He analyzed what he called “a complete act of thought,” including five steps: (1) a felt difficulty, (2) its location and definition, (3) suggestion of possible solution, (4) development by reasoning of the bearing of the suggestion, and (5) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection (Dewey, 1910a, pp. 68-78). Educators quickly misinterpreted these five steps as a description of the scientific method that could be applied to practical problems. In 1918, William Kilpatrick of Teachers College published a seminal article on the “project method,” which used Dewey’s five steps to address problems of everyday life. The article was eventually reprinted 60,000 times as reformers embraced the idea of engaging students with practical problems, while at the same time teaching them about what were seen as the methods of science (Rudolph, 2005).

During the 1920s, reform-minded teachers struggled to use the project method. Faced with ever-larger classes and state requirements for coverage of science content, they began to look for lists of specific projects that students could undertake, the procedures they could use, and the expected results. Soon, standardized lists of projects were published, and students who had previously been freed from rigid laboratory procedures were now engaged in rigid, specified projects, leading one writer to observe, “the project is little more than a new cloak for the inductive method” (Downing, 1919, p. 571).

Despite these unresolved tensions, laboratory education had become firmly established, and growing numbers of future high school teachers were instructed in teaching laboratory activities. For example, a 1925 textbook for preservice science teachers included a chapter titled “Place of Laboratory Work in the Teaching of Science” followed by three additional chapters on how to teach laboratory science (Brownell and Wade, 1925). Over the following decades, high school science education (including laboratory education) increasingly emphasized practical goals and the benefits of science in everyday life. During World War II, as scientists focused on federally funded

research programs aimed at defense and public health needs, high school science education also emphasized applications of scientific knowledge (Rudolph, 2002).

Changing Goals of Science Education

Following World War II, the flood of “baby boomers” strained the physical and financial resources of public schools. Requests for increased taxes and bond issues led to increasing questions about public schooling. Some academics and policy makers began to criticize the “life adjustment” high school curriculum, which had been designed to meet adolescents’ social, personal, and vocational needs. Instead, they called for a renewed emphasis on the academic disciplines. At the same time, the nation was shaken by the Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic bomb and the communist takeover of China. By the early 1950s, some federal policy makers began to view a more rigorous, academic high school science curriculum as critical to respond to the Soviet threat.

In 1956, physicist Jerrold Zacharias received a small grant from NSF to establish the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) in order to develop a curriculum focusing on physics as a scientific discipline. When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched the space satellite Sputnik the following year, those who had argued that U.S. science education was not rigorous enough appeared vindicated, and a new era of science education began.

Although most historians believe that the overriding goal of the post-Sputnik science education reforms was to create a new generation of U.S. scientists and engineers capable of defending the nation from the Soviet Union, the actual goals were more complex and varied (Rudolph, 2002). Clearly, Congress, the president, and NSF were focused on the goal of preparing more scientists and engineers, as reflected in NSF director Alan Waterman’s 1957 statement (National Science Foundation, 1957, pp. xv-xvi):

Our schools and colleges are badly in need of modern science laboratories and laboratory, demonstration, and research equipment. Most important of all, we need more trained scientists and engineers in many special fields, and especially very many more competent, fully trained teachers of science, notably in our secondary schools. Undoubtedly, by a determined campaign, we can accomplish these ends in our traditional way, but how soon? The process is usually a lengthy one, and there is no time to be lost. Therefore, the pressing question is how quickly can our people act to accomplish these things?

The scientists, however, had another agenda. Over the course of World War II, their research had become increasingly dependent on federal fund-

ing and influenced by federal needs. In physics, for example, federally funded efforts to develop nuclear weapons led research to focus increasingly at the atomic level. In order to maintain public funding while reducing unwanted public pressure on research directions, the scientists sought to use curriculum redesign as a way to build the public’s faith in the expertise of professional scientists (Rudolph, 2002). They wanted to emphasize the humanistic aspects of science, portraying science as an essential element in a broad liberal education. Some scientists sought to reach not only the select group who might become future scientists but also a slightly larger group of elite, mostly white male students who would be future leaders in government and business. They hoped to help these students appreciate the empirical grounding of scientific knowledge and to value and appreciate the role of science in society (Rudolph, 2002).

Changing Views of the Nature of Science

While this shift in the goals of science education was taking place, historians and philosophers were proposing new views of science. In 1958, British chemist Michael Polanyi questioned the ideal of scientific detachment and objectivity, arguing that scientific discovery relies on the personal participation and the creative, original thoughts of scientists (Polanyi, 1958). In the United States, geneticist and science educator Joseph Schwab suggested that scientific methods were specific to each discipline and that all scientific “inquiry” (his term for scientific research) was guided by the current theories and concepts within the discipline (Schwab, 1964). Publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962) a few years later fueled the debate about whether science was truly rational, and whether theory or observation was more important to the scientific enterprise. Over time, this debate subsided, as historians and philosophers of science came to focus on the process of scientific discovery. Increasingly, they recognized that this process involves deductive reasoning (developing inferences from known scientific principles and theories) as well as inductive reasoning (proceeding from particular observations to reach more general theories or conclusions).

Development of New Science Curricula

Although these changing views of the nature of science later led to changes in science education, they had little influence in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik. With NSF support, scientists led a flurry of curriculum development over the next three decades (Matthews, 1994). In addition to the physics text developed by the PSSC, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) created biology curricula, the Chemical Education Materials group created chemistry materials, and groups of physicists created Intro-

ductory Physical Science and Project Physics. By 1975, NSF supported 28 science curriculum reform projects.

By 1977 over 60 percent of school districts had adopted at least one of the new curricula (Rudolph, 2002). The PSSC program employed high school teachers to train their peers in how to use the curriculum, reaching over half of all high school physics teachers by the late 1960s. However, due to implementation problems that we discuss further below, most schools soon shifted to other texts, and the federal goal of attracting a larger proportion of students to undergraduate science was not achieved (Linn, 1997).

Dissemination of the NSF-funded curriculum development efforts was limited by several weaknesses. Some curriculum developers tried to “teacher proof” their curricula, providing detailed texts, teacher guides, and filmstrips designed to ensure that students faithfully carried out the experiments as intended (Matthews, 1994). Physics teacher and curriculum developer Arnold Arons attributed the limited implementation of most of the NSF-funded curricula to lack of logistical support for science teachers and inadequate teacher training, since “curricular materials, however skilful and imaginative, cannot ‘teach themselves’” (Arons, 1983, p. 117). Case studies showed that schools were slow to change in response to the new curricula and highlighted the central role of the teacher in carrying them out (Stake and Easley, 1978). In his analysis of Project Physics, Welch concluded that the new curriculum accounted for only 5 percent of the variance in student achievement, while other factors, such as teacher effectiveness, student ability, and time on task, played a larger role (Welch, 1979).

Despite their limited diffusion, the new curricula pioneered important new approaches to science education, including elevating the role of laboratory activities in order to help students understand the nature of modern scientific research (Rudolph, 2002). For example, in the PSSC curriculum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Jerrold Zacharias coordinated laboratory activities with the textbook in order to deepen students’ understanding of the links between theory and experiments. As part of that curriculum, students experimented with a ripple tank, generating wave patterns in water in order to gain understanding of wave models of light. A new definition of the scientific laboratory informed these efforts. The PSSC text explained that a “laboratory” was a way of thinking about scientific investigations—an intellectual process rather than a building with specialized equipment (Rudolph, 2002, p. 131).

The new approach to using laboratory experiences was also apparent in the Science Curriculum Improvement Study. The study group drew on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget to integrate laboratory experiences with other forms of instruction in a “learning cycle” (Atkin and Karplus, 1962). The learning cycle included (1) exploration of a concept, often through a laboratory experiment; (2) conceptual invention, in which the student or

TABLE 1-1 New Approaches Included in Post-Sputnik Science Curricula

teacher (or both) derived the concept from the experimental data, usually during a classroom discussion; and (3) concept application in which the student applied the concept (Karplus and Their, 1967). Evaluations of the instructional materials, which were targeted to elementary school students, revealed that they were more successful than traditional forms of science instruction at enhancing students’ understanding of science concepts, their understanding of the processes of science, and their positive attitudes toward science (Abraham, 1998). Subsequently, the learning cycle approach was applied to development of science curricula for high school and undergraduate students. Research into these more recent curricula confirms that “merely providing students with hands-on laboratory experiences is not by itself enough” (Abraham, 1998, p. 520) to motivate and help them understand science concepts and the nature of science.

In sum, the new approach of integrating laboratory experiences represented a marked change from earlier science education. In contrast to earlier curricula, which included laboratory experiences as secondary applications of concepts previously addressed by the teacher, the new curricula integrated laboratory activities into class routines in order to emphasize the nature and processes of science (Shymansky, Kyle, and Alport, 1983; see Table 1-1 ). Large meta-analyses of evaluations of the post-Sputnik curricula (Shymansky et al., 1983; Shymansky, Hedges, and Woodworth, 1990) found they were more effective than the traditional curriculum in boosting students’ science achievement and interest in science. As we discuss in Chapter 3 , current designs of science curricula that integrate laboratory experiences

into ongoing classroom instruction have proven effective in enhancing students’ science achievement and interest in science.

Discovery Learning and Inquiry

One offshoot of the curriculum development efforts in the 1960s and 1970s was the development of an approach to science learning termed “discovery learning.” In 1959, Harvard cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner began to develop his ideas about discovery learning as director of an NRC committee convened to evaluate the new NSF-funded curricula. In a book drawing in part on that experience, Bruner suggested that young students are active problem solvers, ready and motivated to learn science by their natural interest in the material world (Bruner, 1960). He argued that children should not be taught isolated science facts, but rather should be helped to discover the structures, or underlying concepts and theories, of science. Bruner’s emphasis on helping students to understand the theoretical structures of the scientific disciplines became confounded with the idea of engaging students with the physical structures of natural phenomena in the laboratory (Matthews, 1994). Developers of NSF-funded curricula embraced this interpretation of Bruner’s ideas, as it leant support to their emphasis on laboratory activities.

On the basis of his observation that scientific knowledge was changing rapidly through large-scale research and development during this postwar period, Joseph Schwab advocated the closely related idea of an “inquiry approach” to science education (Rudolph, 2003). In a seminal article, Schwab argued against teaching science facts, which he termed a “rhetoric of conclusions” (Schwab, 1962, p. 25). Instead, he proposed that teachers engage students with materials that would motivate them to learn about natural phenomena through inquiry while also learning about some of the strengths and weaknesses of the processes of scientific inquiry. He developed a framework to describe the inquiry approach in a biology laboratory. At the highest level of inquiry, the student simply confronts the “raw phenomenon” (Schwab, 1962, p. 55) with no guidance. At the other end of the spectrum, biology students would experience low levels of inquiry, or none at all, if the laboratory manual provides the problem to be investigated, the methods to address the problem, and the solutions. When Herron applied Schwab’s framework to analyze the laboratory manuals included in the PSSC and the BSCS curricula, he found that most of the manuals provided extensive guidance to students and thus did not follow the inquiry approach (Herron, 1971).

The NRC defines inquiry somewhat differently in the National Science Education Standards . Rather than using “inquiry” as an indicator of the amount of guidance provided to students, the NRC described inquiry as

encompassing both “the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world” (National Research Council, 1996, p. 23) and also students’ activities that support the learning of science concepts and the processes of science. In the NRC definition, student inquiry may include reading about known scientific theories and ideas, posing questions, planning investigations, making observations, using tools to gather and analyze data, proposing explanations, reviewing known theories and concepts in light of empirical data, and communicating the results. The Standards caution that emphasizing inquiry does not mean relying on a single approach to science teaching, suggesting that teachers use a variety of strategies, including reading, laboratory activities, and other approaches to help students learn science (National Research Council, 1996).

Diversity in Schools

During the 1950s, as some scientists developed new science curricula for teaching a small group of mostly white male students, other Americans were much more concerned about the weak quality of racially segregated schools for black children. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Topeka, Kansas Board of Education was in violation of the U.S. Constitution because it provided black students with “separate but equal” education. Schools in both the North and the South changed dramatically as formerly all-white schools were integrated. Following the example of the civil rights movement, in the 1970s and the 1980s the women’s liberation movement sought improved education and employment opportunities for girls and women, including opportunities in science. In response, some educators began to seek ways to improve science education for all students, regardless of their race or gender.

1975 to Present

By 1975, the United States had put a man on the moon, concerns about the “space race” had subsided, and substantial NSF funding for science education reform ended. These changes, together with increased concern for equity in science education, heralded a shift in society’s goals for science education. Science educators became less focused on the goal of disciplinary knowledge for science specialists and began to place greater emphasis on a liberal, humanistic view of science education.

Many of the tensions evident in the first 100 years of U.S. high school laboratories have continued over the past 30 years. Scientists, educators, and policy makers continue to disagree about the nature of science, the goals of science education, and the role of the curriculum and the teacher in student

learning. Within this larger dialogue, debate about the value of laboratory activities continues.

Changing Goals for Science Education

National reports issued during the 1980s and 1990s illustrate new views of the nature of science and increased emphasis on liberal goals for science education. In Science for All Americans , the AAAS advocated the achievement of scientific literacy by all U.S. high school students, in order to increase their awareness and understanding of science and the natural world and to develop their ability to think scientifically (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989). This seminal report described science as tentative (striving toward objectivity within the constraints of human fallibility) and as a social enterprise, while also discussing the durability of scientific theories, the importance of logical reasoning, and the lack of a single scientific method. In the ongoing debate about the coverage of science content, the AAAS took the position that “curricula must be changed to reduce the sheer amount of material covered” (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989, p. 5). Four years later, the AAAS published Benchmarks for Science Literacy , which identified expected competencies at each school grade level in each of the earlier report’s 10 areas of scientific literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993).

The NRC’s National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996) built on the AAAS reports, opening with the statement: “This nation has established as a goal that all students should achieve scientific literacy” (p. ix). The NRC proposed national science standards for high school students designed to help all students develop (1) abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry and (2) understandings about scientific inquiry (National Research Council, 1996, p. 173).

In the standards, the NRC suggested a new approach to laboratories that went beyond simply engaging students in experiments. The NRC explicitly recognized that laboratory investigations should be learning experiences, stating that high school students must “actively participate in scientific investigations, and … use the cognitive and manipulative skills associated with the formulation of scientific explanations” (National Research Council, 1996, p. 173).

According to the standards, regardless of the scientific investigation performed, students must use evidence, apply logic, and construct an argument for their proposed explanations. These standards emphasize the importance of creating scientific arguments and explanations for observations made in the laboratory.

While most educators, scientists, and policy makers now agree that scientific literacy for all students is the primary goal of high school science

education, the secondary goals of preparing the future scientific and technical workforce and including science as an essential part of a broad liberal education remain important. In 2004, the NSF National Science Board released a report describing a “troubling decline” in the number of U.S. citizens training to become scientists and engineers at a time when many current scientists and engineers are soon to retire. NSF called for improvements in science education to reverse these trends, which “threaten the economic welfare and security of our country” (National Science Foundation, 2004, p. 1). Another recent study found that secure, well-paying jobs that do not require postsecondary education nonetheless require abilities that may be developed in science laboratories. These include the ability to use inductive and deductive reasoning to arrive at valid conclusions; distinguish among facts and opinions; identify false premises in an argument; and use mathematics to solve problems (Achieve, 2004).

Achieving the goal of scientific literacy for all students, as well as motivating some students to study further in science, may require diverse approaches for the increasingly diverse body of science students, as we discuss in Chapter 2 .

Changing Role of Teachers and Curriculum

Over the past 20 years, science educators have increasingly recognized the complementary roles of curriculum and teachers in helping students learn science. Both evaluations of NSF-funded curricula from the 1960s and more recent research on science learning have highlighted the important role of the teacher in helping students learn through laboratory activities. Cognitive psychologists and science educators have found that the teacher’s expectations, interventions, and actions can help students develop understanding of scientific concepts and ideas (Driver, 1995; Penner, Lehrer, and Schauble, 1998; Roth and Roychoudhury, 1993). In response to this growing awareness, some school districts and institutions of higher education have made efforts to improve laboratory education for current teachers as well as to improve the undergraduate education of future teachers (National Research Council, 2001).

In the early 1980s, NSF began again to fund the development of laboratory-centered high school science curricula. Today, several publishers offer comprehensive packages developed with NSF support, including textbooks, teacher guides, and laboratory materials (and, in some cases, videos and web sites). In 2001, one earth science curriculum, five physical science curricula, five life science curricula, and six integrated science curricula were available for sale, while several others in various science disciplines were still under development (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, 2001). In contrast to the curriculum development approach of the 1960s, teachers have played an important role in developing and field-testing these newer

curricula and in designing the teacher professional development courses that accompany most of them. However, as in the 1960s and 1970s, only a few of these NSF-funded curricula have been widely adopted. Private publishers have also developed a multitude of new textbooks, laboratory manuals, and laboratory equipment kits in response to the national education standards and the growing national concern about scientific literacy. Nevertheless, most schools today use science curricula that have not been developed, field-tested, or refined on the basis of specific education research (see Chapter 2 ).

CURRENT DEBATES

Clearly, the United States needs high school graduates with scientific literacy—both to meet the economy’s need for skilled workers and future scientists and to develop the scientific habits of mind that can help citizens in their everyday lives. Science is also important as part of a liberal high school education that conveys an important aspect of modern culture. However, the value of laboratory experiences in meeting these national goals has not been clearly established.

Researchers agree neither on the desired learning outcomes of laboratory experiences nor on whether those outcomes are attained. For example, on the basis of a 1978 review of over 80 studies, Bates concluded that there was no conclusive answer to the question, “What does the laboratory accomplish that could not be accomplished as well by less expensive and less time-consuming alternatives?” (Bates, 1978, p. 75). Some experts have suggested that the only contribution of laboratories lies in helping students develop skills in manipulating equipment and acquiring a feel for phenomena but that laboratories cannot help students understand science concepts (Woolnough, 1983; Klopfer, 1990). Others, however, argue that laboratory experiences have the potential to help students understand complex science concepts, but the potential has not been realized (Tobin, 1990; Gunstone and Champagne, 1990).

These debates in the research are reflected in practice. On one hand, most states and school districts continue to invest in laboratory facilities and equipment, many undergraduate institutions require completion of laboratory courses to qualify for admission, and some states require completion of science laboratory courses as a condition of high school graduation. On the other hand, in early 2004, the California Department of Education considered draft criteria for the evaluation of science instructional materials that reflected skepticism about the value of laboratory experiences or other hands-on learning activities. The proposed criteria would have required materials to demonstrate that the state science standards could be comprehensively covered with hands-on activities composing no more than 20 to 25 percent

of instructional time (Linn, 2004). However, in response to opposition, the criteria were changed to require that the instructional materials would comprehensively cover the California science standards with “hands-on activities composing at least 20 to 25 percent of the science instructional program” (California Department of Education, 2004, p. 4, italics added).

The growing variety in laboratory experiences—which may be designed to achieve a variety of different learning outcomes—poses a challenge to resolving these debates. In a recent review of the literature, Hofstein and Lunetta (2004, p. 46) call attention to this variety:

The assumption that laboratory experiences help students understand materials, phenomena, concepts, models and relationships, almost independent of the nature of the laboratory experience, continues to be widespread in spite of sparse data from carefully designed and conducted studies.

As a first step toward understanding the nature of the laboratory experience, the committee developed a definition and a typology of high school science laboratory experiences.

DEFINITION OF LABORATORY EXPERIENCES

Rapid developments in science, technology, and cognitive research have made the traditional definition of science laboratories—as rooms in which students use special equipment to carry out well-defined procedures—obsolete. The committee gathered information on a wide variety of approaches to laboratory education, arriving at the term “laboratory experiences” to describe teaching and learning that may take place in a laboratory room or in other settings:

Laboratory experiences provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world (or with data drawn from the material world), using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science.

This definition includes the following student activities:

Physical manipulation of the real-world substances or systems under investigation. This may include such activities as chemistry experiments, plant or animal dissections in biology, and investigation of rocks or minerals for identification in earth science.

Interaction with simulations. Physical models have been used throughout the history of science teaching (Lunetta, 1998). Today, students can work

with computerized models, or simulations, representing aspects of natural phenomena that cannot be observed directly, because they are very large, very small, very slow, very fast, or very complex. Using simulations, students may model the interaction of molecules in chemistry or manipulate models of cells, animal or plant systems, wave motion, weather patterns, or geological formations.

Interaction with data drawn from the real world. Students may interact with real-world data that are obtained and represented in a variety of forms. For example, they may study photographs to examine characteristics of the moon or other heavenly bodies or analyze emission and absorption spectra in the light from stars. Data may be incorporated in films, DVDs, computer programs, or other formats.

Access to large databases. In many fields of science, researchers have arranged for empirical data to be normalized and aggregated—for example, genome databases, astronomy image collections, databases of climatic events over long time periods, biological field observations. With the help of the Internet, some students sitting in science class can now access these authentic and timely scientific data. Students can manipulate and analyze these data drawn from the real world in new forms of laboratory experiences (Bell, 2005).

Remote access to scientific instruments and observations. A few classrooms around the nation experience laboratory activities enabled by Internet links to remote instruments. Some students and teachers study insects by accessing and controlling an environmental scanning electron microscope (Thakkar et al., 2000), while others control automated telescopes (Gould, 2004).

Although we include all of these types of direct and indirect interaction with the material world in this definition, it does not include student manipulation or analysis of data created by a teacher to replace or substitute for direct interaction with the material world. For example, if a physics teacher presented students with a constructed data set on the weight and required pulling force for boxes pulled across desks with different surfaces, asking the students to analyze these data, the students’ problem-solving activity would not constitute a laboratory experience according to the committee’s definition.

Previous Definitions of Laboratories

In developing its definition, the committee reviewed previous definitions of student laboratories. Hegarty-Hazel (1990, p. 4) defined laboratory work as:

a form of practical work taking place in a purposely assigned environment where students engage in planned learning experiences … [and] interact

with materials to observe and understand phenomena (Some forms of practical work such as field trips are thus excluded).

Lunetta defined laboratories as “experiences in school settings in which students interact with materials to observe and understand the natural world” (Lunetta, 1998, p. 249). However, these definitions include only students’ direct interactions with natural phenomena, whereas we include both such direct interactions and also student interactions with data drawn from the material world. In addition, these earlier definitions confine laboratory experiences to schools or other “purposely assigned environments,” but our definition encompasses student observation and manipulation of natural phenomena in a variety of settings, including science museums and science centers, school gardens, local streams, or nearby geological formations. The committee’s definition also includes students who work as interns in research laboratories, after school or during the summer months. All of these experiences, as well as those that take place in traditional school science laboratories, are included in our definition of laboratory experiences.

Variety in Laboratory Experiences

Both the preceding review of the history of laboratories and the committee’s review of the evidence of student learning in laboratories reveal the limitations of engaging students in replicating the work of scientists. It has become increasingly clear that it is not realistic to expect students to arrive at accepted scientific concepts and ideas by simply experiencing some aspects of scientific research (Millar, 2004). While recognizing these limitations, the committee thinks that laboratory experiences should at least partially reflect the range of activities involved in real scientific research. Providing students with opportunities to participate in a range of scientific activities represents a step toward achieving the learning goals of laboratories identified in Chapter 3 . 1

Historians and philosophers of science now recognize that the well-ordered scientific method taught in many high school classes does not exist. Scientists’ empirical research in the laboratory or the field is one part of a larger process that may include reading and attending conferences to stay abreast of current developments in the discipline and to present work in progress. As Schwab recognized (1964), the “structure” of current theories and concepts in a discipline acts as a guide to further empirical research. The work of scientists may include formulating research questions, generat-

ing alternative hypotheses, designing and conducting investigations, and building and revising models to explain the results of their investigations. The process of evaluating and revising models may generate new questions and new investigations (see Table 1-2 ). Recent studies of science indicate that scientists’ interactions with their peers, particularly their response to questions from other scientists, as well as their use of analogies in formulating hypotheses and solving problems, and their responses to unexplained results, all influence their success in making discoveries (Dunbar, 2000). Some scientists concentrate their efforts on developing theory, reading, or conducting thought experiments, while others specialize in direct interactions with the material world (Bell, 2005).

Student laboratory experiences that reflect these aspects of the work of scientists would include learning about the most current concepts and theories through reading, lectures, or discussions; formulating questions; designing and carrying out investigations; creating and revising explanatory models; and presenting their evolving ideas and scientific arguments to others for discussion and evaluation (see Table 1-3 ).

Currently, however, most high schools provide a narrow range of laboratory activities, engaging students primarily in using tools to make observations and gather data, often in order to verify established scientific knowledge. Students rarely have opportunities to formulate research questions or to build and revise explanatory models (see Chapter 4 ).

ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT

The ability of high school science laboratories to help improve all citizens’ understanding and appreciation of science and prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers is affected by the context in which laboratory experiences take place. Laboratory experiences do not take place in isolation, but are part of the larger fabric of students’ experiences during their high school years. Following this introduction, Chapter 2 describes recent trends in U.S. science education and policies influencing science education, including laboratory experiences. In Chapter 3 we turn to a review of available evidence on student learning in laboratories and identify principles for design of effective laboratory learning environments. Chapter 4 describes current laboratory experiences in U.S. high schools, and Chapter 5 discusses teacher and school readiness for laboratory experiences. In Chapter 6 , we describe the current state of laboratory facilities, equipment, and safety. Finally, in Chapter 7 , we present our conclusions and an agenda designed to help laboratory experiences fulfill their potential role in the high school science curriculum.

TABLE 1-2 A Typology of Scientists’ Activities

TABLE 1-3 A Typology of School Laboratory Experiences

Since the late 19th century, high school students in the United States have carried out laboratory investigations as part of their science classes. Since that time, changes in science, education, and American society have influenced the role of laboratory experiences in the high school science curriculum. At the turn of the 20th century, high school science laboratory experiences were designed primarily to prepare a select group of young people for further scientific study at research universities. During the period between World War I and World War II, many high schools emphasized the more practical aspects of science, engaging students in laboratory projects related to daily life. In the 1950s and 1960s, science curricula were redesigned to integrate laboratory experiences into classroom instruction, with the goal of increasing public appreciation of science.

Policy makers, scientists, and educators agree that high school graduates today, more than ever, need a basic understanding of science and technology to function effectively in an increasingly complex, technological society. They seek to help students understand the nature of science and to develop both the inductive and deductive reasoning skills that scientists apply in their work. However, researchers and educators do not agree on how to define high school science laboratories or on their purposes, hampering the accumulation of evidence that might guide improvements in laboratory education. Gaps in the research and in capturing the knowledge of expert science teachers make it difficult to reach precise conclusions on the best approaches to laboratory teaching and learning.

In order to provide a focus for the study, the committee defines laboratory experiences as follows: laboratory experiences provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world (or with data drawn from the material world), using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science. This definition includes a variety of types of laboratory experiences, reflecting the range of activities that scientists engage in. The following chapters discuss the educational context; laboratory experiences and student learning; current laboratory experiences, teacher and school readiness, facilities, equipment, and safety; and laboratory experiences for the 21st century.

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Laboratory experiences as a part of most U.S. high school science curricula have been taken for granted for decades, but they have rarely been carefully examined. What do they contribute to science learning? What can they contribute to science learning? What is the current status of labs in our nation�s high schools as a context for learning science? This book looks at a range of questions about how laboratory experiences fit into U.S. high schools:

• What is effective laboratory teaching?
• What does research tell us about learning in high school science labs?
• How should student learning in laboratory experiences be assessed?
• Do all student have access to laboratory experiences?
• What changes need to be made to improve laboratory experiences for high school students?
• How can school organization contribute to effective laboratory teaching?

With increased attention to the U.S. education system and student outcomes, no part of the high school curriculum should escape scrutiny. This timely book investigates factors that influence a high school laboratory experience, looking closely at what currently takes place and what the goals of those experiences are and should be. Science educators, school administrators, policy makers, and parents will all benefit from a better understanding of the need for laboratory experiences to be an integral part of the science curriculum—and how that can be accomplished.

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How to Write a Lab Report

Lab Reports Describe Your Experiment

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Lab reports are an essential part of all laboratory courses and usually a significant part of your grade. If your instructor gives you an outline for how to write a lab report, use that. Some instructors require a lab report to be included in a lab notebook , while others will request a separate report. Here's a format for a lab report you can use if you aren't sure what to write or need an explanation of what to include in the different parts of the report.

A lab report is how you explain what you did in ​your experiment, what you learned, and what the results meant.

Lab Report Essentials

Not all lab reports have title pages, but if your instructor wants one, it would be a single page that states:​

• The title of the experiment.
• Your name and the names of any lab partners.
• Your instructor's name.
• The date the lab was performed or the date the report was submitted.

The title says what you did. It should be brief (aim for ten words or less) and describe the main point of the experiment or investigation. An example of a title would be: "Effects of Ultraviolet Light on Borax Crystal Growth Rate". If you can, begin your title using a keyword rather than an article like "The" or "A".

Introduction or Purpose

Usually, the introduction is one paragraph that explains the objectives or purpose of the lab. In one sentence, state the hypothesis. Sometimes an introduction may contain background information, briefly summarize how the experiment was performed, state the findings of the experiment, and list the conclusions of the investigation. Even if you don't write a whole introduction, you need to state the purpose of the experiment, or why you did it. This would be where you state your hypothesis .

List everything needed to complete your experiment.

Describe the steps you completed during your investigation. This is your procedure. Be sufficiently detailed that anyone could read this section and duplicate your experiment. Write it as if you were giving direction for someone else to do the lab. It may be helpful to provide a figure to diagram your experimental setup.

Numerical data obtained from your procedure usually presented as a table. Data encompasses what you recorded when you conducted the experiment. It's just the facts, not any interpretation of what they mean.

Describe in words what the data means. Sometimes the Results section is combined with the Discussion.

Discussion or Analysis

The Data section contains numbers; the Analysis section contains any calculations you made based on those numbers. This is where you interpret the data and determine whether or not a hypothesis was accepted. This is also where you would discuss any mistakes you might have made while conducting the investigation. You may wish to describe ways the study might have been improved.

Conclusions

Most of the time the conclusion is a single paragraph that sums up what happened in the experiment, whether your hypothesis was accepted or rejected, and what this means.

Figures and Graphs

Graphs and figures must both be labeled with a descriptive title. Label the axes on a graph, being sure to include units of measurement. The independent variable is on the X-axis, the dependent variable (the one you are measuring) is on the Y-axis. Be sure to refer to figures and graphs in the text of your report: the first figure is Figure 1, the second figure is Figure 2, etc.

If your research was based on someone else's work or if you cited facts that require documentation, then you should list these references.

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• Null Hypothesis Examples
• Examples of Independent and Dependent Variables
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• Six Steps of the Scientific Method
• How To Design a Science Fair Experiment
• Understanding Simple vs Controlled Experiments
• Make a Science Fair Poster or Display
• How to Organize Your Science Fair Poster
• What Is an Experiment? Definition and Design
• Scientific Method Lesson Plan
• What Are the Elements of a Good Hypothesis?

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• Exploring the Role of Science Laboratories in Modern Schools

It is essential to foster a deep and enduring passion for science among students in the ever-evolving landscape of education. The role of science laboratories in modern schools is essential if we want to equip the next generation with the skills and knowledge necessary to tackle ever-increasing global challenges.

Establishing well-equipped science laboratories and chemistry laboratories within modern schools is an important aspect of achieving this goal. In these laboratories, students absorb theoretical knowledge and actively engage in hands-on experiments on modern laboratory equipment, which propels them into the realm of scientific exploration.

This article delves into the diverse significance of school science laboratories in contemporary educational settings, arguing for their indispensable inclusion in schools to foster a new generation of curious minds. We’ll also compare laboratory instruction methods of past and contemporary schools.

The Role of Science Laboratories in Modern Schools

In modern schools, science laboratories play a crucial role in providing students with hands-on experiences and practical applications of scientific concepts. The role of science laboratories in schools includes cognitive, practical, and affective aspects that help students learn and grow. Here are some key roles:

1. Experiential Learning

Laboratories provide students with the opportunity to engage in experiential learning, enabling them to observe, experiment, and discover scientific principles on a firsthand basis. This hands-on approach helps students understand and remember concepts better than learning only in theory.

2. Theoretical Knowledge Application

The students will be able to apply theoretical knowledge gained in science classrooms to real-world scenarios in laboratories. Laboratories provide students with the opportunity to witness and experience the practical application of the theoretical concepts taught in the classroom. This helps students understand scientific concepts and see their relevance in practical situations.

3. Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving

Science laboratories teach students how to think critically and solve problems by guiding them through experiments, looking at data, and making conclusions. These skills are essential for success in scientific fields and are transferable to various aspects of life.

4. Practical Skills Development

Laboratory work encourages the development of various skills, such as observation, measurement, data analysis, and interpretation. Students learn how to use scientific equipment, do experiments, make observations, and record data. These abilities are highly valuable in both academic and professional settings.

5. Encouragement of Curiosity and Interest

Lab environments stimulate students’ curiosity and interest in science by providing a dynamic and interactive environment. Engaging in experiments can spark a passion for scientific inquiry and discovery. Students are encouraged to ask questions, design their own experiments, and explore the world of science beyond the confines of textbooks.

6. Preparation for Higher Education and Careers

Practical experience in modern laboratories prepares students and equips them with the skills required for more advanced science courses and other advanced studies and careers in STEM-related fields that include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

7. Safety Awareness

Understanding and following safety guidelines are essential skills that learners can carry into various scientific and workplace contexts, and not only in laboratory settings. The controlled environment of laboratories allows students to learn about and practice safety protocols.

8. Teamwork and Collaboration

Interpersonal skills are valuable in both academic and professional settings. Many laboratory activities involve group work, which is an ideal way to foster teamwork, communication, and collaboration among students.

9. Technology Integration

By incorporating cutting-edge technologies in learning experiences, modern science laboratories allow students to interact with advanced equipment and tools. This exposure helps them stay abreast of technological advancements in the various scientific fields.

10. Assessment of Understanding

The activities of learners in laboratories allow science and chemistry teachers to assess students’ understanding of scientific concepts in a practical context. This form of assessment complements traditional testing methods.

Effective laboratory learning includes effective synthesis. A strong foundation in research skills is often linked to effective synthesis. This includes the ability to find relevant information, assess its credibility, and incorporate it into your synthesis.

In short, with clever lab planning , science labs in modern schools help students learn better by making learning fun and engaging. This helps them understand science better and prepares them for future studies and careers.

The Role of Science Laboratories in Schools — 20th Century vs. 21st Century

Laboratory activities have been a part of the science curriculum for a long time as a way to understand the natural world. Since the 19th century, when schools began systematic science education, the role of the laboratory has emerged as a distinctive aspect of chemistry education. This is also explored in a 2021 DOI publication of Teaching and Learning in the School Chemistry Laboratory, by Avi Hofstein and Muhamad Hugerat.

Case studies show that, after the First World War, scientific knowledge needed rapid expansion. Laboratory work primarily involved verifying and illustrating information previously acquired through lectures or textbooks.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, published a journal of research in 2006: The America’s Lab Report : Investigations in High School Science, Washington, DC. The report states, “Historically, laboratory experiences have been separated from the flow of classroom science instruction and often lacked clear learning goals.”

Effective pedagogy considers the needs, interests, and abilities of learners, aiming to create an engaging and supportive learning environment. The role of science laboratories in American schools has evolved significantly from the previous century to the 21st century. Curriculum development is driven by educational research and advancements in technology.

Researchers aim to bring about changes in educational philosophies, improved learning outcomes, and a more in-depth understanding of effective science teaching methods. Here’s a comparison between the roles of science labs in schools from the previous century and those in modern schools:

Science Laboratories in 20th Century Schools

• Limited Technology Integration: In the previous century, laboratory teaching of high school chemistry and science experiments in science laboratories often relied on basic equipment and manual measurement tools. This was due to limited access to advanced technologies.
• Replication of Experiments: Science teachers emphasized reinforcement of theoretical knowledge rather than encouraging independent inquiry. They focused on replicating known experiments and validating established scientific principles.
• Teacher-Centric Approach: Teaching science in laboratories was often teacher-centric, with instructors demonstrating experiments to explain the science process to students. Learner experience was more passive, observing rather than actively participating in the experimental process.
• Isolation of Disciplines: Interdisciplinary approaches were not common. Laboratories were organized into specific scientific disciplines, with clear distinctions between physics, chemistry, and biology.
• Limited Access to Resources: Schools had limited access to resources and materials for experiments. Learners typically had to share equipment, and laboratories were not always well-equipped.
• Paper-Based Documentation: Students used laboratory notebooks for data recording and analysis on paper, and analyzing the results was a manual process.

Science Laboratories in 21st Century Schools

• Advanced Technology Integration: Science laboratories in modern schools allow more sophisticated and dynamic experiments. They integrate advanced technologies, including computer simulations, digital data collection tools, virtual reality, and other interactive resources.
• Inquiry-Based Learning: The modern learning environment focuses on fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills. There is a shift towards inquiry-based learning, encouraging students to formulate questions, design experiments, and draw conclusions.
• Student-Centric Approach: Modern laboratories are designed to be more student-centric and collaborative. The learners are actively engaged in hands-on activities, working in groups to explore and discover scientific concepts.
• Comprehensive Approaches: The fact that students may engage in experiments that bridge multiple scientific disciplines reflects the interconnected nature of scientific knowledge.
• Global Access to Resources: Global connectivity enhances the range and depth of experiments that students can explore. With the internet, modern schools have access to a wealth of online resources, databases, and virtual labs.
• Digital Documentation and Analysis: Digital platforms have replaced traditional methods of data recording and analysis. Learners with access to modern science laboratories can easily share and collaborate on results by using computer software for analysis, and then present the results in digital formats.
• Focus on Real-World Applications: Practical laboratory work in modern schools emphasizes the application of scientific methods and concepts to real-world scenarios. This approach helps students visualize the relevance of their learning beyond science classrooms.
• Safety and Ethics: Modern laboratories are increasingly concerned with safety and ethical considerations. Schools place a high priority on establishing a secure setting and informing students about the ethical implications of their experiments.
• Global Collaboration: With advancements in communication technologies, students can collaborate on scientific projects with peers from around the world. This promotes a global perspective on scientific inquiry.

In summary, the role of science laboratories in schools has undergone a transformative shift from the previous century to the 21st century. Modern laboratories employ technology, place emphasis on student involvement, promote inquiry-based learning, and promote interdisciplinary approaches to equip students for the challenges of an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

Science Laboratories for All Ages

Introducing children to science lab work from early elementary school age can be beneficial for their overall development. However, the nature of science and the complexity of lab activities and the approach should be age-appropriate. The most important consideration when it comes to science learning is the cognitive and motor skills of learners at different stages of their education, as well as each student’s ability.

Here’s a breakdown of the use of science labs for various educational levels:

1. Early Elementary School (Grades K-2)

• Exploration and Observation: Kids of this age group are all about observation and exploration. Simple hands-on activities might involve basic materials like water, sand, and simple tools to stimulate curiosity.
• Sensory Experiences: Engage young learners in sensory experiences. Let them feel different textures, observe changes in materials, and explore basic cause-and-effect relationships as a part of the learning process.
• Play-and-Learn Experiments: Emphasize the joy of discovery by doing safe, age-appropriate experiments that involve play. Include mixing colors, observing plant growth, and exploring magnetism with simple magnets.

2. Late Elementary School (Grades 3-5)

• Introduction to Lab Equipment: Introduce basic laboratory tools and equipment, such as microscopes, rulers, and thermometers. Teach proper handling and safety procedures.
• Basic Experiments: Include more structured experiments that involve measurement, data recording, and basic analysis. For example, learners might measure the growth of plants under different conditions. This could form the basis of practical work in a science laboratory.

3. Middle School (Grades 6-8)

• Hands-On Inquiry: Emphasize hands-on inquiry-based learning. Students at this level should learn process skills, start formulating hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze data more independently.
• Introduction to Laboratory Reports: Teach learners how to create basic lab reports. including components like hypothesis, procedure, results, and conclusions. Emphasize clear communication of scientific findings.

4. High School (Grades 9-12)

• Advanced Experimentation: Provide opportunities for high school students to explore topics in greater depth and complexity. Teach them to do more advanced experimentation in physics, chemistry, biology, and other specialized fields.
• Research Projects: Encourage independent research projects, allowing students to delve into specific scientific topics of interest on their own or in groups. This fosters a sense of ownership and passion for scientific inquiry, while also teaching them the value of collaboration, often contributing to the more positive attitudes of learners.

5. Secondary School Education (Post-High School)

• Specialized Labs: Offer specialized labs with sophisticated equipment and methodologies for secondary school science students pursuing advanced studies in specific scientific disciplines.
• Research Opportunities: Provide opportunities for students to engage in original scientific research, collaborate with professionals, and learn how to contribute to the scientific community.
• Real-World Applications: Emphasize the application of scientific principles to real-world issues. Advise students on securing internships in science programs, partnerships with industry, or community-based research projects.

As students progress through different educational levels, the use of science labs should evolve as well. The early exposure to age-appropriate, hands-on activities lays the foundation for further, more complex experimentation and research, and visualization of real-world differences they can make.

The goal is to cultivate a curiosity for science, develop critical thinking skills, and prepare students for future academic and professional pursuits in safe environments .

The role of science laboratories in modern schools goes far beyond the confines of traditional classrooms. These laboratories offer dynamic spaces where curiosity and students’ interest are sparked, hypotheses are tested, and a profound understanding of scientific principles is cultivated.

As we stand at the threshold of a future brimming with technological advancements and complex global challenges, the investment in science laboratories is an investment in the intellectual capital of our youth. Schools that foster an environment that encourages scientific literacy, hands-on exploration, and critical thinking prepare students for academic success and empower them to become active contributors to scientific advancements that will shape our world.

We should encourage science laboratories in schools, recognizing them as crucibles of inspiration and innovation that will propel society forward into the future, guided by the inquisitive minds they help to inspire. The school science laboratory experiences can play an integral part in student attitudes toward science and ultimately contribute to students’ achievements later in life.

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• Research Matters — to the Science Teacher

The Role of Laboratory in Science Teaching

Introduction.

Science educators have believed that the laboratory is an important means of instruction in science since late in the 19th century. Laboratory activities were used in high school chemistry in the 1880s (Fay, 1931). In 1886, Harvard University published a list of physics experiments that were to be included in high school physics classes for students who wished to enroll at Harvard (Moyer, 1976). Laboratory instruction was considered essential because it provided training in observation, supplied detailed information, and aroused pupils' interest. These same reasons are still accepted almost 100 years later.

Shulman and Tamir, in the  Second Handbook of Research on Teaching  (Travers, ed., 1973), listed five groups of objectives that may be achieved through the use of the laboratory in science classes:

• skills - manipulative, inquiry, investigative, organizational, communicative
• concepts - for example, hypothesis, theoretical model, taxonomic category
• cognitive abilities - critical thinking, problem solving, application, analysis, synthesis
• understanding the nature of science - scientific enterprise, scientists and how they work, existence of a multiplicity of scientific methods, interrelationships between science and technology and among the various disciplines of science
• attitudes - for example, curiosity, interest, risk taking, objectivity, precision,confidence, perseverance, satisfaction, responsibility, consensus, collaboration, and liking science (1973, p.1119).

Writing about laboratory teaching at the college level, McKeachie said:

Laboratory teaching assumes that first-hand experience in observation and manipulation of the materials of science is superior to other methods of developing understanding and appreciation. Laboratory training is also frequently used to develop skills necessary for more advanced study or research. From the standpoint of theory, the activity of the student, the sensorimotor nature of the experience, and the individualization of laboratory instruction should contribute positively to learning. Information cannot usually be obtained, however, by direct experience as rapidly as it can from abstractions presented orally or in print... Thus, one would not expect laboratory teaching to have an advantage over other teaching methods in the amount of information retention, in ability to apply learning, or in actual skill in observation or manipulation of materials... (in Gage, 1962, p.1144-1145).

Another writer, Pickering (1980), identified two misconceptions about the use of the laboratory in college science. One is that laboratories somehow "illustrate" lecture courses - a function that (in Pickering's opinion) is not possible in a simple, one-afternoon exercise. Pickering contended that most scientific theories are based on a large number of very sophisticated experiments. He suggested that, if lecture topics are to be illustrated, this should be done through the use of audio-visual aids or demonstrations. The second misconception is that laboratories exist to teach manipulative skills. Pickering argued that the majority of students in science laboratory classes do not have a career goal of becoming a professional scientist. Further, many of the skills students learn in laboratories are obsolete in science careers. If these skills are worth teaching, it is as tools to be mastered for basic scientific inquiry and not as ends in themselves (1980, p. 80).

Research Findings

Science educators frequently turn to the research literature for support of their requests for funds for supplies and equipment for laboratory activities. Science education researcher have examined the role of the laboratory on many variables, including achievement, attitudes, critical thinking, cognitive style, understanding science, the development of science process skills, manipulative skills, interests, retention in science courses, and the ability to do independent work.

Many of these studies contain the finding of "no significant differences" between groups. In 1978 the National Science Teachers Association produced the first volume of its series  What Research Says to the Science Teacher.  One of the chapters in this volume was on the role of the laboratory in secondary school science programs. Gary C. Bates reviewed 82 studies and concluded that "...the answer has not yet been conclusively found..." to the question: What does the laboratory accomplish that could not be accomplished as well by less expensive and less time consuming alternatives? (in Rowe, ed., 1978, p. 75).

A number of possible explanations exist for this discouraging conclusion. Much of the research comes from doctoral studies which are usually first attempts at research. Very few studies include a follow-up of the subjects involved to see if there were ant changes other than those tested for at the end of the study. Many of the investigations are of the comparative variety`(approach X vs. a "lab" approach). Often these instructional approaches are not described in sufficient detail for the reader to be able to judge the value of the study.

As McKeachie pointed out, laboratory teaching may not be the best method to choose if one's objective is to have students retain information. However, the need for "educational accountability" has been translated into the need to increase test scores. Some of the outcomes of a "lab approach" are difficult to test in a multiple-choice test.

Some-Positive Findings

Positive research findings on the role of the laboratory in science teaching do exist. Laboratory activities appear to be helpful for students rated as medium to low in achievement on pretest measures (Boghai, 1979; Grozier, 1969). Godomsky (1971) reported that laboratory instruction increased students' problem-solving ability in physical chemistry and that the laboratory could be a valuable instructional technique in chemistry if experiments were genuine problems without explicit directions. Working with older, disadvantaged students in a laboratory setting, researchers (McKinnon, 1976; McDermott et al., 1980) used activities designed to create disequilibrium in order to encourage cognitive development.

Some Final Comments

No space has been allocated in this discussion of the role of the laboratory to the approach involved: inquiry vs. verification. It has been assumed that proponents of laboratory activities are interested in having students inquire and in having them work with concrete objects. Comber and Keeves (1973) found, when studying science education in 19 countries, that in six countries where 10-year-old students made observations and did experiments in their schools, the level of achievement in science was higher than in schools where students did not perform these activities.

A modern research technique is meta-analysis - in which a group of studies is analyzed for similarities and differences in findings related to their common thrust. A meta-analysis on the effects of various instructional techniques (Wise and Okey, 1983) was focused on 12 teaching strategies. Two of these 12 were related to the laboratory approach: inquiry-discovery and manipulative. Although these two strategies did not exhibit as large an effect as did the strategies of focusing and questioning, there was some positive support for inquiry teaching. An effective science classroom was characterized as one in which students had opportunities to physically interact with instructional materials and engage in varied kinds of activities (1983, p. 434). Lott (1983) reported on a meta-analysis of the effect of inquiry (inductive) teaching and advance organizers in science education. Lott wrote that the inductive approach appeared to be more useful (than the deductive) in those situations where high levels of thought, learning experiences, and outcomes demands were placed upon subjects (1983, p. 445).

Science educators at all levels need to continue to study the role of the laboratory in science teaching. However, perhaps the question we should be asking is not "What is the laboratory better than?" but "For what purposes should the laboratory be used, under what conditions, and with what students?"

by Patricia E. Blosser, Professor of Science Education, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Blosser, Patricia E. (1980).  A Critical Review of the Role of the Laboratory in Science Teaching.  Columbus, OH: ERIC Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education. Boghai, Davar M. (April 1979). A Comparison of the Effects of Laboratory and Discussion Sequences on Learning College Chemistry.  Dissertation Abstracts, 39 (10), 6045A. Comber, L. C. & J. P. Keeves. (1978).  Science Education in Nineteen Countries, International Studies in Evaluation I.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Fay, Paul J. (August 1931). The History of Chemistry Teaching in American High Schools.  Journal of Chemical Education, 8 (8),1533-1562. Gage, N. L., et al. (1963).  Handbook of Research on Teaching.  Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Godomsky, Stephen F., Jr. (1971). Programmed Instruction, Computer-Assisted Performance Problems, Open Ended Experiments and Student Attitude and Problem Solving Ability in Physical Chemistry Laboratory.  Dissertation Abstracts, 31 (11), 5873A. Grozier, Joseph E. Jr. (1969). The Role of the Laboratory in Developing Positive Attitudes Toward Science in a College General Education Science Course for Nonscientists.  Dissertation Abstracts, 31 (11), 2394A. Lott, Gerald W. (1983). The Effect of Inquiry Teaching and Advance Organizers Upon Student Outcomes in Science Education.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20 (5), 437-451. McDermott, Lillian et al. March (1980). Helping Minority Students Succeed in Science, II. Implementation of a Curriculum in Physics and Biology.  Journal of College Science Teaching, 9 , 201-205. McKinnon, Joe W. (April 1976). Encouraging Logical Thinking in Pre-Engineering Students.  Engineering Education, 66 (7), 740-744. Moyer, Albert E. (February 1976). Edwin Hall and the Emergence of the Laboratory in Teaching Physics.  The Physics Teacher, 14 (2), 96-103. Pickering, Miles. (February 19, 1980). Are Lab Courses a Waste of Time?  The Chronicle of Higher Education,  p. 80. Rowe, Mary B., Ed. (1978).  What Research Says to the Science Teacher, I,  Washington, DC: National Science Teachers Association. Travers, Robert M. Ed. (1973).  Second Handbook of Research on Teaching.  Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. Wise, Kevin C. & Okey, Kames R. (1983). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Various Science Teaching Strategies on Achievement.  Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20 (5), 419-435.

Essay on Science for Students and Children

500+ words essay on science.

Essay on science:  As we look back in our ancient times we see so much development in the world. The world is full of gadgets and machinery . Machinery does everything in our surroundings. How did it get possible? How did we become so modern? It was all possible with the help of science. Science has played a major role in the development of our society. Furthermore, Science has made our lives easier and carefree.

Science in our Daily Lives

As I have mentioned earlier Science has got many changes in our lives. First of all, transportation is easier now. With the help of Science it now easier to travel long distances . Moreover, the time of traveling is also reduced. Various high-speed vehicles are available these days. These vehicles have totally changed. The phase of our society. Science upgraded steam engines to electric engines. In earlier times people were traveling with cycles. But now everybody travels on motorcycles and cars. This saves time and effort. And this is all possible with the help of Science.

Secondly, Science made us reach to the moon. But we never stopped there. It also gave us a glance at Mars. This is one of the greatest achievements. This was only possible with Science. These days Scientists make many satellites . Because of which we are using high-speed Internet. These satellites revolve around the earth every day and night. Even without making us aware of it. Science is the backbone of our society. Science gave us so much in our present time. Due to this, the teacher in our schools teaches Science from an early age.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Science as a Subject

In class 1 only a student has Science as a subject. This only tells us about the importance of Science. Science taught us about Our Solar System. The Solar System consists of 9 planets and the Sun. Most Noteworthy was that it also tells us about the origin of our planet. Above all, we cannot deny that Science helps us in shaping our future. But not only it tells us about our future, but it also tells us about our past.

When the student reaches class 6, Science gets divided into three more subcategories. These subcategories were Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. First of all, Physics taught us about the machines. Physics is an interesting subject. It is a logical subject.

Furthermore, the second subject was Chemistry . Chemistry is a subject that deals with an element found inside the earth. Even more, it helps in making various products. Products like medicine and cosmetics etc. result in human benefits.

Last but not least, the subject of Biology . Biology is a subject that teaches us about our Human body. It tells us about its various parts. Furthermore, it even teaches the students about cells. Cells are present in human blood. Science is so advanced that it did let us know even that.

Leading Scientists in the field of Science

Finally, many scientists like Thomas Edison , Sir Isaac Newton were born in this world. They have done great Inventions. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. If he did not invent that we would stay in dark. Because of this Thomas Edison’s name marks in history.

Another famous Scientist was Sir Isaac Newton . Sir Isaac Newton told us about Gravity. With the help of this, we were able to discover many other theories.

In India Scientists A..P.J Abdul was there. He contributed much towards our space research and defense forces. He made many advanced missiles. These Scientists did great work and we will always remember them.

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My School Laboratory Essay

Our school laboratory essay.

We are living in the world of science and technology. So, the need to understand scientific concepts and theories is extremely great. In response to this dire need, facilities for the study of physical sciences have been given great extension in both the higher and lower centers of education. But to understand the modern scientific concepts we can not do without a well-equipped laboratory. It‘s necessary that an educational institute has a good laboratory to cater to the needs of the students.

Our school laboratory is located in the third storey of the school building. It comprises of three separate halls specified for three main branches i.e. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Each hall is quite spacious (big) to accommodate fifty students at a time. The halls are well ventilated and have a very good lighting arrangement. These are well electrified to meet the students, demands. The system is designed to cater for individual and group work.

I wish our laboratory be given further development and expansion so that it proves a source of inspiration for other educational institutions to establish such ideal laboratories.

2 thoughts on “My School Laboratory Essay”

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Understanding How Students Navigate An Upper-Year Science Laboratory Course In A Post-Pandemic Era

• Tabussom Qureshi Mount Royal University

The scope of this preliminary study revolves around investigating the effectiveness of experiential learning in upper-year science laboratory courses in a post-pandemic era. In this study we have explored two key questions: 1. Can experiential learning facilitate independent inquiry in an upper-year undergraduate laboratory in a post-pandemic era? 2. Do incoming students feel prepared to carry out an in-person, hands-on, upper-year undergraduate laboratory experiments in a post-pandemic era? By exploring these questions through student reflections and perceptions in an advanced analytical chemistry inquiry-based laboratory course, we hope to acknowledge the impact the pandemic has had on first- and second-year foundational labs, and on the preparation of students for upper-year undergraduate labs. The shift towards virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic may have heavily impacted the development of core wet laboratory skills and thus made it challenging for students to build their confidence and skillset and attain success when challenged at a higher level.

Copyright (c) 2024 Nausheen W. Sadiq, Tabussom Qureshi

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• 26 June 2024

The strategy behind one of the most successful labs in the world

• Luka Gebel 0 ,
• Chander Velu 1 &
• Antonio Vidal-Puig 2

Luka Gebel is a PhD candidate at King’s College London and incoming assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Global Business School for Health, University College London.

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Chander Velu is professor of innovation and economics at the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Antonio Vidal-Puig is professor of molecular nutrition and metabolism at the Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Biochemist John Kendrew working on a structural model of a protein at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, in the 1960s. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

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The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, is a world leader in basic biology research. The lab’s list of breakthroughs is enviable, from the structure of DNA and proteins to genetic sequencing. Since its origins in the late 1940s, the institute — currently with around 700 staff members — has produced a dozen Nobel prizewinners, including DNA decipherers James Watson, Francis Crick and Fred Sanger. Four LMB scientists received their awards in the past 15 years: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for determining the structure of ribosomes, Michael Levitt for computer models of chemical reactions, Richard Henderson for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and Gregory Winter for work on the evolution of antibodies (see Figure S1 in Supplementary information; SI). Between 2015 and 2019, more than one-third (36%) of the LMB’s output was in the top 10% of the world’s most-cited papers 1 .

What is the secret of the LMB’s success? Many researchers and historians have pointed to its origins in the Cavendish Laboratory, the physics department of the University of Cambridge, UK, where researchers brought techniques such as X-ray crystallography to bear in the messy world of biology. Its pool of exceptional talent, coupled with generous and stable funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC), undoubtedly played a part. However, there is much more to it. None of these discoveries was serendipitous: the lab is organized in a way that increases the likelihood of discoveries (see ‘New questions, new technologies’).

To find out how, we conducted 12 interviews with senior LMB and external scientists to provide insights into the organization. We also analysed 60 years’ worth of archival documents from the lab, including research publications, meeting minutes, external assessments and internal management reports (see SI for methods).

New questions, new technologies

The LMB’s approach is to identify new and important scientific questions in uncrowded fields that require pioneering technologies to answer them. The lab develops that technology to open up the field; continual improvements bring more breakthroughs, which can be scaled up to enter markets. Here are three examples.

DNA sequencing. In the 1940s and 1950s, biochemists Max Perutz and John Kendrew sought a way to discriminate between normal and pathological haemoglobins and myoglobin. The LMB developed molecular fingerprinting and chromatography technologies 11 that allowed various biological questions to be addressed, such as how genes are regulated or how molecular programming is involved in cell death. Protein and DNA sequencing also enabled the study of molecular mechanisms of viruses and organ development. Transferring these discoveries into clinical and industrial settings changed drug discovery from a process of screening compounds to one of active design.

Antibodies. At the LMB in 1975, biologist George Köhler and biochemist César Milstein discovered a method to isolate and reproduce individual (monoclonal) antibodies from the many proteins that the immune system makes. This breakthrough enabled the characterization of antibodies, and sparked inquiries into gene regulation and programmed cell death. Monoclonal antibodies now account for one-third of new treatments that reach the clinic.

Cryogenic electron microscopy. The LMB has a long-standing history in the development of electron microscopy, with Aaron Klug’s group using it in the 1960s to elucidate the structure of viruses. Cryo-EM visualizes atoms in biological molecules in 3D. It was developed on the back of three decades of the LMB’s accumulated expertise in areas from optimizing cooling and vacuum technology to microscopy, computing-based imaging and electron detectors. The method has revolutionized protein research and many other areas.

We identify the LMB’s management model as the key — it sets a culture with incentives and provides oversight to optimize the interplay between science and technology. By integrating high-risk basic science with innovative technology, the LMB facilitates a knowledge feedback loop that helps the institute to identify promising questions and continuously push scientific boundaries (see SI, quote 1). In the context of economics and management theory, the LMB behaves as a ‘complex adaptive system’.

Here, we outline our findings and encourage research organizations, funding bodies and policymakers to consider adopting a similarly holistic and coherent approach to managing basic scientific research. In short, they should prioritize long-term scientific goals and effectively manage scarce resources; foster economies of scale and scope by promoting complementarities between different areas of scientific research; and create value by establishing synergies and feedback between scientific questions and engineering-based technology solutions.

Integrated management

The LMB’s management strategy prioritizes three elements — culture, incentives and management oversight — that sustain a feedback loop between science and technology development (see SI, Figure S2).

Culture. The LMB sets a coherent culture by promoting scientific diversity among its staff, encouraging the exchange of knowledge and ideas and valuing scientific synergies between different areas of research. Senior managers view this culture as central to an evolutionary process in which a broad and diverse talent pool helps the organization to be flexible and to adapt and survive. Scientific discovery emerges from it in a sustainable but unpredictable way.

César Milstein analysing DNA. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

The LMB recognizes the importance of having a defined, yet broad and open, institutional research direction. It encourages the recruitment of groups with diverse but aligned interests that are complementary (see SI quote 2). This approach has ensured that the LMB can achieve a critical mass of expertise in specific research areas. It enables economies of scale while retaining the flexibility to innovate by pioneering new avenues and emerging fields. It also recognizes that not every promising direction can be followed.

Scientific diversity has been a trait from the start. Although the lab was founded by physicists and chemists, its researchers today include mathematicians, engineers and zoologists (see SI quote 3). Yet too much variety is to be avoided in case it dilutes the culture. Minutes of an executive committee meeting from 1997 reveal the reticence of lab heads to appoint purely clinical researchers on the grounds that this might alter the lab’s culture and its focus (see SI quote 4).

We can make the UK a science superpower — with a radical political manifesto

A diverse portfolio of related and aligned themes makes it easier to share techniques and methods between projects and inspires programmes to aim at bolder goals (see SI quote 5). For example, the development of cryo-EM to examine macromolecules benefited both the structural-studies division and the neurobiology division, and led to a better understanding of molecular pathways in neurodegeneration.

Incentives. The LMB uses an incentive structure to align the organization’s culture with the goals of its people. Actively promoting shared values and common aims helps researchers to feel part of the LMB community and proud to belong to it, fostering long-term loyalty. “The LMB has always had a non-hierarchical structure — one in which emphasis lies in the quality of the argument, rather than in the status of the proponent,” a 2001 external review of the LMB noted (see SI quote 6).

Unlike many labs, the LMB focuses on investing in and promoting junior members rather than bringing in external talent. This is reflected in the high standards of its junior scientific recruitment. Many of its Nobel prizewinners, including Richard Henderson and Gregory Winter, began their careers at the lab and were promoted internally.

Prioritizing small teams also optimizes the sharing of technologies and budgets and incentivizes scientists from different fields to converge on the same projects. Although the LMB is structured in divisions, almost all career scientists have independent but aligned scientific programmes. This connectivity often leads to rapid and creative combinations of ideas between teams. It also allows for the sharing of failure and resilience to it, which is inevitable in high-risk, high-stakes innovative research (see SI quote 7).

Structural biologist Daniela Rhodes studies chromatin structure and regulation at the LMB. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

LMB resources are allocated in ways that encourage innovative collaboration between internal teams and divisions. For example, limits are set for research groups to bid for external grants, because these tend to have short-term, results-oriented requirements that might not align with the LMB’s longer-term ambitions.

Furthermore, the LMB’s director can flexibly allocate funds to promote innovative collaborations and initiatives. Recent examples include forays into synthetic biology (using engineering to develop or redesign biological systems) and connectomics (the study of the connections in the brain and nervous system).

Management oversight. The LMB uses a management oversight system that resolves tensions between technology and science priorities, which would otherwise affect productivity. Technologists aim to develop and improve tools to match the best specifications for as many potential users as possible. Scientists help to define technology specifications that are based on their aims and data, which are usually on the cutting edge of existing capabilities.

Want to speed up scientific progress? First understand how science policy works

Tensions are present in the differences between how technology developers and scientists speak, define problems, operate and organize their project milestones and risk assessments. Technologists often focus on developing solutions for relatively well-defined practical problems that are amenable to rigorous project-management techniques, whereas scientists tend to work on uncertain, ambiguous questions and problems that require flexibility in experimental processes and resource allocation 2 .

To address these issues, the LMB uses a mixture of interventions and a robust process for selecting which scientific questions it focuses on. For example, technology developers with distinct specialisms operate in a dedicated workshop unit to develop prototypes. Experienced principal investigators act as go-betweens, translating scientific terms into technical engineering requirements and vice versa. Decisions around scientific resources are delegated to the divisions; money for major technology development is allocated centrally through the lab’s executive committee. Thus, the feedback loop between science and technology that facilitates innovation is enhanced (see SI quote 8).

Long-term potential

Because the LMB’s strategy focuses on long-term, transformational goals rather than short-term incremental gains, its internal evaluation system for researchers is more concerned with the potential of the overall scientific programme 3 than with standard individual performance metrics, such as the number of journal publications and citations, personal impact factors, grant funding, awards and collaborations. Scientists must openly assess which questions hold the highest value according to the LMB’s focus areas, and balance that with the cost of technology development and risks of failure while sustaining diversity in their research portfolio.

To manage these competing demands, the LMB integrates internal expertise and external reviews. The quinquennial external review process by the MRC is a strategic approach to innovation that anticipates future trends and brings fairness to decision-making. In our interviews, managers articulated the importance of quinquennial reviews to inform and stress-test the scientific direction of the organization. These reviews include visits from a committee of reviewers who are aware of the lab’s culture and who score a group leader’s scientific productivity and originality on the basis of reports, internal reviews and interviews.

Biochemist Max Perutz preparing a sample for examination using X-ray crystallography. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Individual labs are evaluated on the usual metrics, such as results from past research, but more emphasis is placed on the future outlook. As a result, a young investigator’s potential and the impact of their research might result in tenure, even if they have a limited number of publications. Marks below a certain point mean the research group will be closed within a year. But this remains an exception so that the long-term nature of programmes is not lost.

The review process also plays a crucial part in identifying emerging scientific trends and opportunities. For example, in 2005, the visiting review committee identified the need for a new animal facility that would highlight the potential of mammalian biology — a concept that had not been prioritized previously (see SI quote 5).

US agency launches experiments to find innovative ways to fund research

Indeed, the LMB generally declines projects that require scaling up technology and large physical spaces, in case they come to dominate the lab’s work and space requirements beyond the financial income that the project can generate. In 1996, for example, the lab decided to forgo projects that involved scaling up its profitable protein and antibody engineering successes (see SI quote 9).

The LMB could be seen as a high-quality incubator for early-stage innovative projects, with a high turnover of research projects. This turnover does not compromise the viability of the research, because the small group structure allows for flexibility of research projects and mobility of staff. The LMB focuses on projects until they become successful, fundable and scalable by having access to funding opportunities closer to later stages of scientific development and translational research.

A complex adaptive system

Although these rules govern the LMB, the outcomes are more than the sum of their parts. The organization’s management strategy gives rise to emergent behaviours and deliverables that align with its long-term research goals. The management model has emerged from a set of actions taken by management over time that collectively result in a coherent approach to achieving the overall aim of the LMB 4 . In management theory terms, the LMB is a complex adaptive system, similar to an ecosystem.

A complex adaptive system is a self-organizing system with distinctive behaviour that emerges from interactions between its components in a manner that is usually not easy to predict 5 . Components might include individuals and their activities; material parts, such as technologies; and the ideas generated from these interactions 6 .

Effective management of this complex adaptive system is fundamental to the LMB’s success. Through continual adaptation and evolution, the LMB can generate new knowledge more effectively than most other institutions can.

For example, the LMB helped to develop cryo-EM for application in the biological sciences through collaborative efforts involving scientists and engineers and the integration of software and advanced cooling techniques. Rather than one individual orchestrating and coordinating all the steps, this multidisciplinary team exhibited self-organization and iterative adjustments, bound by its shared culture. This allowed the emergence of new solutions, mirroring the adaptability seen in ecosystems.

Lessons and challenges ahead

In our view, the LMB system should be considered a framework for how funding is allocated to basic science more widely. Looking to the future, however, we see three challenges that the LMB and the life-sciences community will need to overcome.

First, scientific questions in the basic biosciences are becoming more complex, requiring ever more sophisticated and expensive equipment 7 . Developing such tools might be beyond the capability of one lab, and wider institutional collaborations will be required.

The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2021. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Second, institutions dedicated to basic life sciences are increasingly urged by funders and society to transition quickly into clinical applications, which risks undermining the quality and competitive edge of their fundamental research 8 . The gap between fundamental bioscience and clinical translation is notoriously hard to bridge 9 (see also Nature 453 , 830–831; 2008 ). It is also high risk.

In recent years, some funders have pulled out of basic bioscience. For example, more of the US National Institutes of Health’s extramural funding over the past decade has gone to translational and applied research than to basic science (see Science 382 , 863; 2023 ). Some highly reputable basic-science research institutions have suffered as a result and have even been dissolved, such as the Skirball Institute in New York City 10 . However, it is crucial to resist the temptation of dismantling basic science research, considering the complexity and difficulty of re-establishing it.

In response, a lab such as the LMB might enhance the translation of its discoveries by strengthening connections with the clinical academic sciences and private-sector industries. Leveraging strengths in the pharmaceutical industry — in areas such as artificial intelligence and in silico modelling — can bolster basic science without compromising a research lab’s focus. The LMB’s Blue Sky collaboration with the biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca is a step in this direction (see go.nature.com/3rnsvyu ).

Third, it is becoming increasingly challenging for basic science labs to recruit and retain the best scientific minds. Translational research institutes are proliferating globally. Biotechnology and pharma firms can pay higher salaries to leading researchers. And researchers might be put off by the large failure rates for high-risk projects in fundamental research, as well as by the difficulties of getting tenure in a competitive lab such as the LMB.

As a first step, governments must recognize these issues and continue to fund high-quality, high-impact fundamental science discoveries. The use of effective research-management strategies such as the LMB’s will make such investments a better bet, de-risking discovery for the long-term benefit of society.

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Why is The New York Times now promoting an anti-science agenda?

This essay stems from concerns about two editorials published in The New York Times recently. We felt that they were problematic in that the past is viewed through a blurred prism to produce revisionist history. By John P. Moore and Gregg Gonsalves.

The New York Times’ science reporters have provided outstanding coverage of Covid-19 since the earliest days in 2020, including how the pandemic started . Unfortunately, the paper’s opinion desk has had a far more checkered record, culminating in two highly controversial essays that were released online last week and co-published in a two-page spread in the print edition on Sunday, June 9. The Times has made it clear to colleagues that it is not interested in considering articles that rebut these two essays . Despite that attitude, the outlandish nature of the two articles does require a public reckoning.

The essay by Alina Chan reiterates speculation that the Covid-19 pandemic originated via a leak of an infectious virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. There is no new information in her essay, as it reiterates points made on multiple occasions elsewhere, including in her book . She adds into the mix the persistent allegation that NIH-funded research was instrumental in the creation of the coronavirus that sparked the pandemic . These are extraordinary claims: Science, and US tax dollars, are being blamed for a pandemic that has killed over 1.1 million Americans, and perhaps as many as 20 million people worldwide. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there is no verifiable proof that what Chan alleges actually happened. Multiple US intelligence agencies have investigated the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. None of them has been able to come up with a definitive answer as to what happened, a reflection of the lack of evidence. Some intelligence community (IC) reports favor a lab leak, but without high confidence, but a majority of the IC reports suggest that a natural origin, via animal-to-human transmission in a Wuhan market, is the more likely explanation that is consistent with all the scientific evidence we have to date. There remains uncertainty about happened, which may never be resolved because only the Chinese government has access to more definitive information – and it’s not releasing what it may know. That lack of surety is why it remains valid to consider both the lab leak and “natural origins” as on the table .

Despite the evidence gaps, Chan, however, has written an essay that is deeply slanted towards the lab leak hypothesis. To her, speculation, however much it has been debunked over the past 4 years, becomes fact – or as near to it as makes no difference. The “science” she presents, the underlying virology of what she claims happened at the WIV, has all been debunked over and over again, both in the science   literature  and in  online   essays . Chan highlights at considerable length what’s not known about the “natural origin” hypothesis, implying that the absence of evidence is in some way sinister – while skating over the much bigger evidence gaps involved in her preferred lab leak explanation. The alleged role played by the NIH in funding dangerous virology experiments at the WIV has also been thoroughly refuted . Of note is that the WIV’s funding for coronavirus research came overwhelmingly from the Chinese government; if something problematic did in fact happen, to blame the NIH is to entirely miss the main point. Here is but one example of the fallacious thinking inherent to Chan’s analyses. She, correctly, states that pandemic started in Wuhan, and that the WIV is located in Wuhan. But she then asserts that these two facts must be inter-connected. That’s false logic. Let’s pose another hypothetical: If a new pandemic were first identified via samples collected in a food court at Hartsdale International Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, would we conclude that a leak from the CDC’s laboratory in that cite was responsible? Or would we factor in that Hartsdale is America’s busiest airport, and hence a potential source of virus dissemination between humans? Overall, Chan seeks to blame science for the pandemic, but she can offer no proof that adequately underpins her opinions.

The accompanying essay by Zeynep Tufekci blames scientists and public health specialists in the Trump administration for poor decision-taking and messaging in the tumultuous early months of the pandemic. Having 20/20 hindsight about 2020 is all very well, but not to us, who also remember what it was like in February through April of that year. Decisions had to be taken under circumstances where hard evidence was hard or impossible to come by. It was entirely reasonable (and the only option) to base decisions on the assumption that CoV-2 would behave like SARS-CoV-1 and/or influenza. In early 2020, nobody knew then what only became clear very much later about how the virus was transmitted under what circumstances. That kind of knowledge only emerged over time. The fuss Dr. Tufekci makes about the “6-foot rule” for social distancing is way wide of the mark. Of course there was no hard evidence about 6-foot, as opposed to 5- or 7-, 4- or -8. How could there be at that time? But the recommendation was neither irrational nor unreasonable, as it was based on available information about other viruses. We also now know, in mid-2024, that masks do in fact reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Obtaining, collating and understanding the data on complex social topics isn’t a rapid process. Criticizing good faith decisions made at a time of international crisis is simply not helpful.

The leading European democracies, Canada, and other nations all made decisions comparable to what was done in the USA. Indeed, many public health specialists, and ongoing national enquiries (e.g., in the UK), have concluded that lockdowns, masking recommendations and other restrictions were generally applied too little and too late – and this was at a time when American cities were seeing bodies pile up in refrigerated trucks. It should also be recalled that American public health officials were working in the administration of a President, Trump, who had no understanding of the science and who was susceptible to the pseudoscience and quackery poured into his ears by other administration officials, Republican politicians, and a grab-bag of business people whose only interest was in corporate profits . How could a science-based, public health agenda ever predominate in that environment? Why blame the rational officials who did their best in impossible circumstances? And why did Dr. Tufekci ignore the one true public health fiasco in the early days – the CDC’s appalling failure over COVID tests under the supine leadership of Dr. Robert Redfield?

Tufekci makes favorable comments on how the UK handled key aspects of Covid, based on a brief visit she made to London in 2021. One of us is British by birth and has many family members and friends in that country. First, the UK’s initial response to Covid was, if anything, worse than the USA’s – leading to a 2020 death rate that was among the worst in Europe . Poor leadership from Prime Minister Johnson was to blame, as is now also becoming clear from the UK’s national Covid inquiry . Dr. Tufekci suggests that trust in the National Health Service was at the heart of why Britons embraced the Covid vaccines more than in the USA. The reality, however, is that all three of the UK’s main political parties, and every leading newspaper, supported the vaccine rollout in 2020-2021. In the UK, there was little or none of the politically motivated vaccine polarization that we saw in the USA, a phenomenon that created “ Red Covid”  (i.e., Republican voters were persuaded to forego the Covid vaccines, and hence died of Covid at a sadly disproportionate rate). Indeed, the right-of-center Conservative party has even expelled a  member who spread anti-vaccine propaganda . Is there a universe in which our Republican party would kick out, for example,  Marjorie Taylor Greene  for expressing similar views? Yes, disinformation about Covid exists in the UK, but not at the level we now experience in America.

It is  disinformation about COVID-19 ,  and particularly vaccines that has so damaged “public trust” in science and public health, particularly among Republican voters and the consumers of information (sic) pumped out  by right-wing med ia. In her essay, Dr. Tufekci badly misses this key point when she focuses her criticism on the actions of Trump administration scientists and public health specialists during the first months of the pandemic. The real villains lie elsewhere. Accordingly, Dr. Tufekci has done our professions a great disservice. And, sadly, she was enabled by The New York Times opinion desk editors. What has this “paper of record” now become? Does it value online clicks over accuracy? Has it become merely a vehicle that backs its outstanding and very popular Games Apps? Does the Times truly seek to energize the anti-science agenda that is now such a feature of right-wing media outlets such as the New York Post , the Washington Examiner , the Epoch Times ? It would not have surprised us to see the Chan and Tufekci essays on those websites. But to see them in The New York Times was simply shocking.

John P. Moore is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, where he oversees an HIV-1 vaccine and virology research program. He has also been a frequent commentator and editorial writer on Covid-19 vaccines and related topics.

Gregg Gonsalves is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health and an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Yale Law School. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

• Posted in: Public Health , Science and the Media
• Tagged in: Alina Chan , antivaccine , COVID-19 , lab leak , New York Times , public health , vaccines , Zeynep Tufekci

Posted by John Moore

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The blood microbiome is probably not real.

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Up until recently, if bacteria were detected in your blood you would be in a world of trouble. Blood was long considered to be sterile, meaning free of viable microorganisms like bacteria. When disease-causing bacteria spread to the blood, they can cause a life-threatening septic shock.

But the use of DNA sequencing technology has allowed researchers to more easily detect something that had been reported as early as the late 1960s: bacteria can be found in the blood and not cause disease.

As we begin to map out and understand the complex microbial ecosystem that lives in our gut and elsewhere in the body, we contemplate an important question: is there such a thing as a blood microbiome?

Detecting a fingerprint in the blood

Our large intestine is not sterile; it is teeming with bacteria. But there are parts of the body that were long thought to be devoid of microorganisms. The brain. Bones. A variety of internal fluids, like our synovial fluid and peritoneal fluid. And, importantly, the blood.

Blood is made up of a liquid called plasma filled with red blood cells, whose main function is to carry oxygen to our cells. It also transports white blood cells, important to monitor for and fight off infections, as well as platelets, involved in clotting. 

In the 1960s, a team of Italian researchers published  multiple papers  describing “mycoplasm-like forms”—meaning shapes that look like a particular type of bacteria that often contaminate cells cultured in the lab—in the blood of healthy people. This finding was confirmed in 1977 by a different team, which reported that  four out of the 60 blood samples  they had drawn from healthy volunteers showed bacteria growing in them. These types of tests, however, were rudimentary compared to what we have access to now. In the 2000s, they were mostly supplanted by DNA testing.

While we can sequence the entire DNA of any bacteria found in the blood, the technique most often used is 16S rRNA gene sequencing. I have always admired physicists’ penchant for quirky names: gluons, neutrinos, and charm quarks. Molecular biologists, by comparison, tend to be more sober. Yes, we have genes like  Sonic hedgehog  and proteins called scramblases; usually, though, we have to contend with the dryness of “16S rRNA.” You see, RNA is a molecule with many uses. Messenger RNA (or mRNA) acts as a disposable copy of a gene, a template for the production of a specific protein. Transfer RNA (or tRNA) actually brings the building blocks of a protein to where they are being assembled. And ribosomal RNA (or rRNA) is the main component of the giant protein factories in our cells known as ribosomes. One of its subunits is made up of, among others, a particular string of RNA known as the 16S rRNA.

The cool thing about the gene that codes for this 16S rRNA molecule is that it is very old and it mutates at a slow rate. By reading its precise sequence, scientists can tell which species it belongs to. Most of the studies of the putative blood microbiome use this technique to tell which species of bacteria are present in the blood being tested. The limitation of this test, however, is that dead bacteria have DNA too. The fact that DNA from the 16S rRNA gene of a precise bacterial species was detected in someone’s blood does not mean these bacteria were alive. For there to be a microbiome in the blood, these microorganisms need to live.

Which brings us to another important point of discussion. In order for scientists to agree that a blood microbiome exists, they first need to decide on the definition of a microbiome, and this is still a point of contention. In 2020, while companies were more than happy to sell hyped-up services testing your gut microbiome and claiming to interpret what it meant for your health, actual experts in the field met to agree on just what the word meant. “We are lacking,” they  wrote , “a clear commonly agreed definition of the term ‘microbiome’.” For example, do viruses qualify? A microbiome implies life but viruses live on the edge, pun intended: they have the genetic blueprint for life yet they cannot reproduce on their own.

These experts proposed that the word “microbiome” should refer to the sum of two things: the microbiota, meaning the living microorganisms themselves, and their theatre of activity. It’s like saying that the Earth is not simply the life forms it houses, but also all of their individual components, and the traces they leave behind, and the environmental conditions in which they thrive or die. The microbiome is made up of bacteria and other microorganisms, yes, but also their proteins, lipids, sugars, and DNA and RNA molecules, as well as the signalling molecules and toxins that get exchanged within their theatre. (This is where viruses were sorted, by the way: not as part of the living microbiota but as belonging to the theatre of activity of the microbiome.)

The microbiome is a community, and this community has a distinct habitat.

So, what does the evidence say? Is our blood truly host to a thriving community of microorganisms or is something else going on?

Transient and sporadic

Initial studies of the alleged blood microbiome were  small . The amounts of bacteria that were being reported based on DNA sequencing were tiny. If this microbiome existed, it seemed sparse, more  “asteroid field in real life”  than “asteroid field in the movies.”

An issue looming over this early research is that of contamination. If bacteria are detected in a blood sample, were they really in the blood… or did they contaminate supplies along the way? When blood is drawn, the skin, which has its own microbiome, is punctured. The area is usually swabbed with alcohol to kill bacteria, and the supplies used should be sterile, but suffice to say that from the blood draw to the DNA extraction to the DNA amplification to the sequencing of this DNA, bacteria can be introduced into the system. In fact, it is such common knowledge that certain bacteria are found inside of the laboratory kits used by scientists that this ecosystem has its own name: the kitome. One way to rule out these contaminants is to simultaneously run negative controls alongside samples every step of the way, to make sure that these negative controls are indeed free of bacteria. But early papers rarely reported when controls were used.

Last year, results from what purports to be the largest study ever into the question of whether the blood microbiome exists were  published in  Nature Microbiology . A total of 9,770 healthy individuals were tested. The conclusion? Yes, some bacteria could be found in their blood, but the evidence contradicted the claim of an ecosystem. In 84% of the samples tested, no bacteria were detected. In most of the other samples, only one species was found. In an ecosystem, you would expect to see species appearing together repeatedly, but this was not the case here. And the species they found most often in their samples were known to contaminate these types of laboratory experiments.

So, what were the few bacteria found in the blood and not recognized as contaminants doing there in the first place if they were not part of a healthy microbiome? The authors lean toward an alternative explanation that had been floated for many years: these bacteria are transient. They end up in the blood from other parts of the body, either because of some minor leak or through their active transportation into the blood by agents such as dendritic cells. Like pedestrians wandering off onto the highway, these bacteria do not normally live in the blood but they can be seen there when we look at the right moment.

Putting the diagnostic cart before the horse

This blood microbiome story could end here and simply be an interesting example of scientific research homing in on a curious finding, testing a hypothesis, and ultimately refuting it (or at the very least providing strong evidence against it). But given the incentives of modern research and the social-media spotlight cast on the academic literature, there are two slightly worrying angles here that merit discussion.

Scientists are more and more incentivized to find practical applications for their research. It’s not enough, for example, to study bacteria that survive at incredibly high temperatures; we must be assured that the  DNA replication enzyme  these bacteria possess will one day be used in laboratories all over the world to conduct research, identify criminals, and test samples for the presence of a pandemic-causing coronavirus.

In researching this topic, I came across many papers claiming the existence of “blood microbiome signatures” for certain diseases that are not known to be infectious. We are thus not talking about infections leaking in the blood and causing sepsis. I saw reports of signatures for  cardiovascular disease ,  liver disease ,  heart attacks , even for  gastrointestinal disease  in dogs .  The idea is that these signatures could soon be turned into (profitable) diagnostic tests. The problem, of course, is that these studies are based on the hypothesis that a blood microbiome is real; that its equilibrium can be affected by disease; and that these changes can be reliably detected and interpreted.

But if the blood microbiome is imaginary, we are just chasing ghosts. This is not unlike the time that scientists were publishing signatures of microRNAs in the blood for every possible cancer. When I looked at the published literature in grad school, I realized that the multiple signatures reported for a single cancer  barely overlapped . They were just chance findings. Compare enough variables in a small sample set and you will find what appears to be an association.

My second concern is that the transitory leakage of bacteria into the blood, as evidenced by the recent  Nature Microbiology  paper, will be used as confirmation of a pseudoscientific entity: leaky gut syndrome. At the end of their paper, the researchers  hypothesize  that these bacteria end up in the blood because the integrity of certain barriers in the body are compromised during disease or during periods of stress. The “net” in our gut gets a bit porous, and some of our colon’s bacteria end up in circulation, though they are not causing disease as far as we can tell. A form of leaky gut is known to exist  in certain intestinal diseases , likely to be a consequence and not a cause. But leaky gut syndrome, favoured by non-evidence-based practitioners, does not appear to be real, yet many websites portray it as the one true cause of all diseases, a real epidemic. Nuanced scientific findings have a history of being stolen, distorted, and toyed with by fake doctors to give credence to their pet theories. Though I have yet to see examples of it, I suspect work done on this hypothesized blood microbiome will similarly get weaponized.

You have been warned.

Take-home message: - Our blood was long considered to be sterile, meaning free of viable microbes, unless a dangerous infection leaked into it, causing sepsis - Studies have provided evidence for the presence of bacteria in the blood of some healthy humans, leading to the hypothesis that, much like in our gut, our blood is host to a microbiome - The largest study ever done on the topic provided strong evidence against this hypothesis. It seems that when non-disease-causing bacteria find themselves in our blood, it is temporary and occasional

@CrackedScience

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