biology

Lab Notebook Procedures

Biology 1B – Ciletti –

Table of Contents: You must keep an up-to-date table of contents on the first page of your laboratory notebook. List the experiment title and complete page numbers.

Title: Every experiment must have a descriptive title.

Lab partners: First and last names should be listed for each lab partner that was present and participated in the laboratory experiment.

All of the above should appear before any data or results in your notebook.

Objectives: Describe or list what the learning objectives are for this lab experiment.

Procedures: There are two ways to handle this

1) Everything can be written out step by step.

2) You can reference the lab manual and indicate only the changes that you made (i.e. enzyme was extracted from potatoes instead of turnips)

Graphs/Tables/Pictures/etc:

All of these items must have a title and legend explaining what is represented in the table. This doesn’t have to be lengthy, as long as someone who did not do the experiment can look at the table or graph and understand what was going on.

Calculations:

Show the first of any series of calculations in detail, from then on only the answer is needed. This allows you to check back and see that you did not, for example, use an incorrect formula. Graphs need to be done with a ruler. No freehand lines are allowed. Graphs also should be fairly large so that you are better able to accurately position points and lines. Divide and number the graph logically (i.e. by 2’s, 5’s or 10’s rather than by 3’s or 7’s)

Discussion and conclusions:

For you discussion, the question you should ask yourself is “What did I set out to do? And How well did it work? What went wrong?”. Your discussion should flow from that point. Do not directly answer the questions that appear in your lab manual, but instead, use them to guide your thoughts as you analyze your data.