SCI 207 Final Lab Report ( Original Work)

Title

Name

SCI 207: Dependence of man on the environment

Instructor

Date

*This template will provide you with the details necessary to finalize a quality Final Lab Report. Utilize this template to complete the Week 5 Final Lab Report and ensure that you are providing all of the necessary information and proper format for the assignment. Before you begin, please note the following important information:

1. Carefully review the Final Lab Report instructions before you begin this assignment

2. The Final Lab Report should cover all 3 experiments from your Week Two Lab

3. Review instructor feedback from the Week Three outline of the final lab report and make changes as necessary

4. Review the Sample Final Lab Report for an example of a final product on a different topic. Your format should look like this sample report before submission.

5. Run your Final Lab Report through turnitin using the student folder to ensure protection from accidental plagiarism

Title

Abstract

The abstract should provide a brief summary of the methods, results, and conclusions. It should very briefly allow the reader to see what was done, how it was done, and the results. It should not exceed 200 words and should be the last part written (although it should still appear right after the title page).

Introduction

The introduction should describe the background of water quality and related issues using cited examples. You should include scholarly sources in this section to help explain why water quality research is important to society. When writing this section, make sure to cite all resources in APA format.

The introduction should also contain the objective for your study. This objective is the reason why the experiment is being done. Your final report should provide an objective that describes why we want to know the answer to the questions we are asking.

Finally, the introduction should end with your hypotheses. This section should include a hypothesis for each one of the three experiments. These hypotheses should be the same ones posed before you began your experiments. You may reword them following feedback from your instructor to illustrate a proper hypothesis, however, you should not adjust them to reflect the “right” answer. You do not lose points for an inaccurate hypothesis; scientists often revise their hypotheses based on scientific evidence following an experiment.

Materials and Methods

The materials and methods section should provide a brief description of the specialized materials used in your experiment and how they were used. This section needs to summarize the instructions with enough detail so that an outsider who does not have a copy of the lab instructions knows what you did. However, this does not mean writing every little step like “dip the pH test strip in the water, then shake the test strips,” these steps can be simplified to read “we used pH test strips to measure water pH”, etc. Additionally, this section should be written in the past tense and in your own words and not copied and pasted from the lab manual.

Results

The results section should include all tables used in your experiments. All values within the tables or graphs should be in numerical form and contain units. For instance, if measuring the amount of chloride in water you should report as 2 mg/L or 0 mg/L not as two or none.

The results section should also highlight the important results in paragraph form, referring to the appropriate tables when mentioned. This section should only state the results as no personal opinions should be included. A description of what the results really mean should be saved for the discussion. For example, you may report, 0mg/L of chlorine were found in the water, but should avoid personal opinions and interpretations of the data such as, no chlorine was found in the water showing it is cleaner than the others samples.

Discussion

The discussion section should interpret your data and provide conclusions. Start by discussing if each hypothesis was confirmed or denied and how you know this.

The discussion should also relate your results to the bigger water concerns and challenges. For example, based on your experiments you might discuss how various bottled water companies use different filtrations systems. Or, you could discuss the billion dollar bottled water industry. For example, do you think it is worth it to buy bottled water? Why or why not? Your final lab report should utilize resources to put your results into context.

Finally, the results section should also address any possible factors that affected your results, such as possible contamination in the experiments or any outside factors (i.e., temperature, contaminants, time of day) that affected your results? If so, how could you control for these in the future? You should also propose some new questions that have arisen from your results and what kind of experiment might be proposed to answer these questions.

Conclusions

The conclusion section should briefly summarize the key points of your experiments. What main message would you like people to have from this report?

References

Include at least four scholarly references and your lab manual in APA format.