ANM103 Animal Form, Function and Evolution

ANM103 Animal Form, Function and Evolution

Task 1b Final Laboratory Report instructions

For this task, you are to write a laboratory report on one of the laboratories completed during the semester.

The laboratory report should consist of +/-1200 words (+/- 10%) in the format of a scientific paper.

Font: Arial 12, 1,5 line spacing

The report needs to be formatted as follows:

Title

Prepare a title that is descriptive yet concise. This should not be the same title as what is in your laboratory manual!

Introduction

Your introduction again needs to be different from the laboratory manual. Start by introducing the broad topic as a whole. Provide a bit of background information on the concepts you will be writing about. Then, introduce a few scientific studies (yes, you need to do some research!) that have tackled this topic. Finally, you need to state your aims and hypotheses or predictions for the experiment, and justify why you predict certain outcomes or at the very least describe what the different outcomes might indicate (as though you had not yet done the experiment).

Methods

Describe the materials and methods used in the experiment. This should be a shortened or prose version of what is in your lab manual, and described in the first or third person (i.e. dont say you!). Must be described in full sentences, not bullet points!

Results

Heres where things get interesting! This is where you state your results. Try to state them in sentence form first and then refer to a figure or table that you will make. This section requires at least one graph OR table. For some labs, your results will just reflect your own experimental outcomes. For others, you will have data from the entire class that you need to incorporate into your report. These results will be made available on Canvas as they are generated. Remember that this section is just supposed to show results based on numbers or outcomes you are NOT meant to interpret anything quite yet! Show your reader what you found, but dont tell them what it means until the next section.

Discussion

Now that you have demonstrated your results, here is where you need to discuss them. Start by describing your results in plain language. Then, connect them with your original hypotheses or predictions from the introduction section. Were your results as expected? Or were they different? What do they mean in the context of your question? You will also need to provide a few references of other scientific studies here that have done similar experiments or have evidence of other outcomes. Note that these may have similar results to your own, in which case discuss why the outcomes appear to be repeatable. If these other studies show results that are different from what you got, try to think of a scientific explanation of why this might be (and not just state we made mistakes)! If you *did* make mistakes, or you think the experiment had limitations that is okay to state, but do not harp on about it. At the end of the discussion, suggest a future study or experiment that could be done to answer any outstanding questions about this topic, or that might delve deeper into the topic. In other words, if there was a follow up experiment to provide you with more information about this system, what might it look like? At the end of your discussion, provide a concluding short statement reiterating what you found and what it means.

References

Here is where you need to list any references you cited in your paper. There should be at least 4-5 peer reviewed, primary articles (i.e. not books, not your lab manual, not Wikipedia, not websites).

Talk to your tutor if you are having trouble finding references that are appropriate. You can use Harvard style referencing if you need guidance but as long as all references are consistently formatted (i.e. all the same format) and have year, authors, title, journal with volume and page numbers then you can pretty much use any style you like (but remember they have to be all the SAME!).