Students have likely not crafted a technical description in their general education, or even a memo, but lab reports are an indelible part of the traditional education experience. However, thought is not necessarily given toward things like purpose and audience, especially when the latter is essentially just the instructor by default. A lab report, though, must pay precise attention to these things in the professional world. A lab report is, at its most basic, a writeup of a scientific experiment that has been conducted. It includes any relevant framing information, a description of the experiment itself, and any takeaways that the authors(s) has and wishes to share. Such takeaways are ripe for manipulation (as is data ultimately), and one must be sure to avoid cherry picking, imposing dubious or unsubstantiated interpretations, and generally contravening the ethical standards of reporting on such things. The lab report is a way for every scientific endeavor to be written up in a standardized way while retaining the uniqueness of the given experiment. This standard format generally includes:
- Title – less is not necessarily more here
- Abstract – summary of the contents of the report – often this is the only information initially available to the reader
- Introduction – introduces the exigence of the particular experiment, background information, and context within the field of research
- Materials – list of the materials used in the course of the experiment
- Methods – the procedure by which the experiment was conducted, aimed at replicability
- Results – any tables, graphs, or other visual representations of data gathered, as well as a written summary of anything observed during the experiment
- Discussion – thorough reckoning with the results, implications, and interpretations, including potential reasons behind results
- Conclusion – summarizes takeaways and emphasizes whatever points the author wants to make about the work and
- References – citations of research used in the introduction and discussion
- Acknowledgements – thanking anyone who contributed to the experiment or the report
- Appendix – optional repository of additional images and figures
Continuing with our focus on our field, the lab report was aimed at describing the implementation and results of an experiment in our particular major. An engineering lab report allows engineers to conduct experiments that have a specific application and to advocate for this application to other engineers or relevant bodies. This lab report was external in that we crafted it ourselves and conducted it of our volition and then submitted it to external entities in formal fashion (though we did need to obtain their permission to conduct the experiments). Our particular experiment tested the efficacy of different types of roofs at mitigating the urban heat island effect in New York City, and was aimed at contributing to the collective knowledge of this spectrum, demonstrating that green roofs do the best job in certain situations, providing the government and building owners with the information needed to act on this matter, and perhaps eliciting interest (and funding) in further research. It is very materials-oriented, which lines up with our field (civil engineering). My revisions include several changes to sentence structure to improve readability, fixes and updates to data elements, relocation of certain paragraphs, and additions that emphasize the goals of the report as well as ones that do more to specify certain elements of the data collection process.
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