The Biology Lab

Biology is about studying life. We study life first and foremost by observing it.

In the biology laboratory, we observe life, and use the principles of the Scientific Method to learn how life works.

Tools

Your primary tools for the Biology lab, are your senses, and your mind. You must learn how to observe details about living things. Watch, listen, and document what exists, and what is happening. You will also need to describe things both qualitatively (using words about qualities and characteristics) and quantitatively (using numbers and measurements).

For this reason, you should expect to document whatever you observe in this lab.

The simplest way is to create a laboratory notebook that contains the notes for each set of experiments that you do. You can do this on paper or digitally, but be sure that the notebook is easy for you to access, and that you record the date and time of each experiment.

Lab Reports and Papers

When you are ready to tell others about your experiments, you will write a lab report or scientific paper discussing your findings. Scientific reports usually follow a consistent format and have some or all of the following sections.

Introduction

Materials and Methods

Results

Discussion and Conclusion

References

A scientific paper is not meant to be RIGHT all of the time. It is an exploration of questions. You discuss the question that lead you to do the experiment including your HYPOTHESIS if any in the INTRODUCTION. Then you list the tools and instructions that you used to do the experiment in the MATERIALS AND METHODS section. This allows others to reproduce your experiment. Next you list any data found as descriptions, images, recordings, tables, graphs, and/or diagrams in the section marked RESULTS. At the end you discuss your conclusions, such as whether your hypothesis was supported by the data in DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS section of the report. Any outside sources that you used in your paper should be listed at the end in the REFERENCES section so that people can look up what background is needed to understand the work, and to find the context of your work among others.

A scientific paper is necessary, because no matter how great the things you discover, if you never tell anyone about it, no one else can learn from it. Science is a collection of knowledge passed down from person to person from the earliest humans to you. By observing science, you are helping to greater validate scientific theories, and you are adding to the collective work of all of those who went before you, and preparing the way for those that will come after you.

Welcome to the world of Science!