Lab Report Guidelines: Content & Organization
Your cognitive psychology lab report is a 5-7 page description of the experiment that you completed. It should resemble a brief article in a scientific journal. It will be graded on 1 content, organization and style .
Content
I will be looking for content in the following four (4) parts of your lab report...
I. In an introductory section (which does not have a heading), you will summarize the literature relevant to your experiment. That literature is the single article, which you can find a link to in the experiment's description. Your summary of the article should answer four (4) questions...
• Why Was the Research Conducted? The answer to this question is in the article's introduction, specifically, in the statement of the research hypothesis.
• How Was the Research Conducted? The answer to this question is in the Method section of the article. Here, you'll find a description of the variables the researchers manipulated and measured.
• What Were the Results? The answer to this question is in the Results section of the article. Read between the confusing statistical notations to discern the gist of the results.
• What Do the Results Mean? That is, do the results support the hypothesis or not? The answer to this question is in the Discussion section of the article.
Your summary should logically lead to a statement of your research hypothesis, which is the predicted outcome of your experiment.
II. In a section titled "Method," you will describe the procedures you used to test your hypothesis. Include a careful description of what you manipulated (your IV) and what you measured (your DV). Your description should provide enough detail so that a reader could
replicate your experiment.
III. In a section titled "Results," you will describe your results, focusing on the particular comparisons that provide a test of your hypothesis.
IV. In a section titled "Discussion," you will:
• interpret your results in terms of your hypothesis
• describe any limitations of your experiment, including problems encountered during the experiment.
• propose a logical "next step" for future research.
1 See the "Writing in APA Style" handout.
Organization
Your lab report will have a title page, with your name, the sections described above, and a 1 reference page. Everything should be in APA style .
Throughout your report there should be conceptual organization; that is, ideas should follow one another logically. A good paper has conceptual organization at different levels:
• You should organize your main ideas in ways that follow logically. And be sure to tell the reader in your introduction how you'll organize the main ideas. Then follow through accordingly.
• Each paragraph should express a single theme. That theme should be made obvious early on in the paragraph (i.e. in the first sentence or two).
A good way to tell if a sentence belongs in a paragraph is to ask yourself how that sentence contributes to understanding the theme of the paragraph. there is no set length for a paragraph but if it goes beyond a page or two, you're probably doing something wrong. Likewise, no paragraph should be only one sentence long.
Of course, the themes for different paragraphs should following in logical order aided, if necessary, by a transition sentence.
• Each sentence should express a single idea. Watch out for "and," "but," "which is,". These are common ways of combining more than one idea in a sentence. The result is that you'll have a run-on sentence. If you suspect a run-on, try breaking the sentence in two to determine if it is easier to read that way.