Sample Lab Reports from Biology Courses
Sample Lab Report for BIO 001:
“Impact of Sodium Chloride on Yeast Fermentation” (PDF) is a lab report written for BIO 001 in 2015. The assignment received a grade of A- (93). All expected lab report sections are included except an abstract, as this is typically not required in BIO 001. The report also includes a supplemental data section, as it was required for the report. Comments have been made in each section and on critical points in order to best explain the intent behind how each section was completed. This report is not perfect, and is meant to be used as a general example. A grade of A- was given rather than an A because of a lack of detailed explanation in the results section. Expanding on and adding to the key points in this report using your professor’s or TA’s guidelines and suggestions is recommended.
Sample Lab Report for BCOR 012:
“Assessment of Natural Selection Acting Upon Individual Characteristics of the Precis coenia Butterfly” (PDF) is a lab report written for BCOR 012 Exploring Biology. This lab report received a grade of an A-. The assignment was to write a full-length laboratory report on an experiment that was done in class. It was to include all the necessary components of a laboratory report: title, abstract, introduction, methods and materials, results, discussion, and works cited. The report includes all necessary methods to recreate the experiment, all results and conclusions drawn from these results, two figures, and the use and citations of outside sources. In a laboratory report the sections are usually separated. In the lab report you may see sentences that are deleted and replaced with ellipses (…). This is to discourage plagiarism.
Sample Lab Report for BCOR 012:
“The effect of intraspecific competition on Paramecium micronucleatrum population growth,” (PDF) is a report written for BCOR 012 lab in 2014 that is based on a similar experiment to that of the second Sample Lab Report. It received an A-. The experiment was conducted during lab time and required a full report (worth 50 points) with an extensive list of requirements provided by the TA (found at the end of the sample). Although similar to the second report, it illustrates the range of variability in approaches to lab reports. It includes all of the standard sections, formatting, citations, 4 figures and a table. Several sections of the report have been replaced with ellipses to discourage plagiarism.
Sample Lab Report for BCOR 012:
“Plant-fungal symbiosis negatively impacts the growth of sweet corns, Zea mays L., in terms of low fertilizer” (PDF) was written for BCOR 012 in Spring 2018. Sections that have been redacted to discourage plagiarism are also marked.
Sample Lab Report for BCOR 102: Ecology and Evolution
This is a lab report for BCOR 102: Ecology and Evolution (PDF). While it is certainly not perfect, it still provides a good example of how a full lab report should look. Reports for this class are usually created using RStudio, a computer program to run the programming language called ‘R’, which you will use often in lab. If the formatting seems a little weird, it’s because I wrote this report using RStudio then had to ‘knit’ it to Word, something you’ll be very familiar with once you take this class.
Lab reports are a way to descriptively summarize the process of experimentation. They should provide enough detail so that another researcher could repeat the procedure and obtain similar results. In professional fields, reports are published in academic journals once they go through the rigorous process of peer revision, so getting the hang of writing papers like this early on is extremely advantageous! A report consists of an abstract (brief summary of each section of the report), introduction (where you introduce your topic and any previous research), methods (describe what you did with plentiful detail), results (show your results in figures and tables, and describe them in words), discussion (interpret your results in the context of your experiment), and the literature cited (in Ecology format).
I’ve annotated this report to try to highlight key spots in the format or content of the report. Each TA is different with their grading style, but each assignment comes with a grading rubric that should be very closely followed if a great grade is desired. I omitted some parts of this report that were not necessary components of understanding what a lab report is, which you will see noted with “…[omitted]…” Good luck!
Sample Lab Report: What Not to Do
This is a sample lab report written for BCOR 102 (PDF) on an experiment conducted in lab. This experiment aimed to observe evolution by measuring phenotypic variation in different species of goldenrod plant in Centennial Woods. Researchers went out in the field and took height and stem diameter measurements for the different species of goldenrod and then analyzed the data to draw conclusions.
This report was written in a hurry and failed to address all of the expectations of the TA. The main problem with this report is that it did not include enough detail about the specifics of the experiment. There is a lot of red pen on the physical copy of the draft that is somewhat difficult to read. So I took my original copy and added annotations for each section to summarize and analyze the comments from the TA in paragraph form, and to avoid making the draft crowded and illegible.