For a class that includes laboratory exercises, you will need to carefully record your laboratory experiments in a notebook. A laboratory notebook should be detailed and accurate so that anyone who wishes to repeat your experiment can do so. The laboratory notebook also provides crucial material for any report or article you may write later about your experiment. Researchers take notebooks seriously, never removing a page or erasing entries. That practice keeps them from misrepresenting results.
Your notebook will typically have the following components:
table of contents
date of each experiment
title
purpose (the objective of the experiment)
materials (a list of equipment, specimens, and chemicals you used in the experiment)
procedures (the method you planned to follow as well as the alterations you made to that procedure while conducting the experiment)
acknowledgments (those who helped you with the experiment)
results (the data gathered from the experiment)
data analysis (calculations based on your data)
discussion (your assessment of whether the experiment was successful, your interpretation of your results, your accounting for any surprising results, and your conclusions about what you learned from the experiment)
Related topics:
Research papers and laboratory reports
Literature reviews
Research proposals
Poster presentations