Parents Weekend

Enjoy sleeping in this weekend and visiting with your families. A reminder that your Elodea - Snail write up is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday October 28th. If by chance you have not started to write your lab yet (yikes!) or have "misplaced" the template it is below. Be sure to refer to the guide to writing scientific papers for further explanation of formatting and content. You might also want to check out the Sample Lab Report. If you reference any sources in your paper (other than the lab handout) you need to add a literature cited section.

Title

Introduction

What is relevant background information on the topic? How does what you are studying relate to the larger world? For the purpose of this assignment, the introduction should be no more than five to seven sentences.

Materials & Methods

You can cite the lab handout here. If you deviated from any of the hypotheses or created your own you need to write that here.

Results

In your results section on only PRESENT data. Do NOT interpret it. A data table or figure is fine. Make sure that it has a title, any necessary labels and a one to two sentence description of what is being presented.

Discussion

Here is where you interpret your data. Make note of any trends/patterns. How did the results compare with your hypotheses? What were potential sources of error? If you were to do this experiment again, how would you modify it? Overall were your results significant?

Conclusion

This section simply states what the researcher thinks the data mean, and, as such, should relate directly back to the problem/question stated in the introduction. This section should not offer any reasons for those particular conclusions--these should have been presented in the Discussion section. By looking at only the Introduction and Conclusions sections, a reader should have a good idea of what the researcher has investigated and discovered even though the specific details of how the work was done would not be known.