Cindy Zheng
The City College of New York
Writing for Engineering: ENGL 21007
Professor Jacobson
March 20, 2023
Lab Report Analysis
Similar to how people in different professions write books, poems, or essays to establish their thoughts and ideas, lab reports are important means of communication used by scientists and researchers to explain the methodology used in conducting an experiment and to record and publicize the results of that experiment to the public to contribute to their respective fields. A lab report has eight components title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references along with other additional elements. Generally, most lab reports follow that linear of title, abstract, introduction all the way to the conclusion and references. However, there can still be some variation between reports due to the preferred style of reports written by the researcher(s) writing the reports. In this analysis I will be discussing the two lab reports and how they’ve been constructed in respect to each other to the general eight components of a lab report. The two reports are “Literacy interest, home literacy environment and emergent literacy skills in preschoolers” (by Carroll et al., 2019) and “Formal literacy practices through play: exposure to adult literacy practices increases child-led learning and interest” (by Colliver et al., 2021) in which both reports will be refer to as report 1 and report 2 throughout this analysis.
The first component of the lab report is the title. It is one of the most important part of a lab report because it is the first thing that readers will see. Most of the time, readers will use the title to gauge whether the report is consistent with what they are trying to look for and if it’s worth their time to read on. Therefore, the goal for most titles is to be easy to read, concise, and unique to a broad or specific group of audience. In the first report, the title “Literacy interest, home literacy environment and emergent literacy skills in preschoolers” (by Carroll et al., 2019) is an easy title to read and it has no scientific or mathematical terms attached. From the title, readers can infer that the report will be on the correlation between emergent literacy skills in preschoolers, their literacy interest, and their home literacy environment. In the second report, “Formal literacy practices through play: exposure to adult literacy practices increases child-led learning and interest” (by Colliver et al., 2021), the title is also straightforward because the reader can infer that through some sort of play led by adult literacy practices, child-led learning and interest will be affected. In both reports, the title uses simple language without much technical jargon.
The second component is the abstract. Proceeding the title, the abstract is the next piece of the lab report that most readers will look at for them to quickly decided whether they want to read on and where to locate the parts of the report that they are interested in. The abstract ideally includes the introduction, the results, and the conclusion. There are many different variations of the abstract such as the informative abstract which present major findings and the descriptive abstract which is less popular abstract style that only states topics covered in the report without giving a brief summary of the results or conclusions. In lab report one, the author introduces the purpose of the report, methods used, results, and conclusions in a manner that is easy to read. The author also introduced and defined keywords such as “emergent literacy, home and community, SES, literacy interest, reading motivation” so that readers would be informed as to what to look out for when reading the report to understand the overall report better. Lab report two, however due to how the report is structured presented all information in paragraph form including the abstract, which may be a bit more overwhelming to navigate as the introduction, results, and conclusions were not written as definitively as report one.
The third component of the lab report is the introduction. The introduction is where the authors can make their claim of why their topic is important, how it is relevant to past and future research, and it should give a brief overview of the methods used in finding the answer to their questions. In the introduction of the first report, the author does a good job of introducing the topic being researched and explaining why it is important by bringing in relevant past evidence to prove the significance of their research paper. For instance, “Many previous studies have investigated the importance of HLE, but they have not always shown consistent results. — However, recent findings have indicated that this is a significant oversimplification and that the relationship between HLE and child attainment is much more complex and multi- directional.” (Carroll et al., 2019, P.2) By stating how previous research is lacking in comparison to more recent studies, the authors prove the importance of their research and hence proving their credibility to their readers. Additionally, in report one, a section named “Highlights” (Carroll et al., 2019, P 1) was added in order to place emphasis on “What is already known about this topic”, “ What this paper adds” , and “Implications for theory, policy or practice” (Carroll et al., 2019, P.2) . Having this section before delving into the introduction and hard facts of previous studies done on the topic gives ample time for readers to understand the research and to develop trust in the researcher’s findings. In report two however, the authors had gone on from the abstract straight to the introduction without the highlights section, therefore I had difficulty understanding what the authors were explaining. However, a highlight of report 2 is the use of many references to past research done to explain why the researchers work were relevant. Regardless of how different both introduction paragraphs were, both reports did a great job of introducing what the purpose of the study was, how it was relevant to the past and how their findings could impact future research and the education of children. Both reports also briefly touched upon the methods used in their research before closing the introduction with their hypotheses(s).
The fourth component of the lab report which is the materials and methods section. The materials and methods section also known as the equipment and methods is the section where authors try to introduce and convince their readers that their method of collecting data was valid. This is done by describing the list of materials needed and explaining the methods/procedure in detail so that other researchers could also replicate the experiment. Both reports have depicted the methods and materials well, however, report two had included more statistics and mathematical terms such as
“(Mlit = 56.3, SDlit = 4.6, nlit = 26, 12 females; Mnum = 55.8, SDnum = 3.3, nnum = 20, 12 females” (Colliver et al., 2021, P 4) which helps to provide a more accurate interpretation of the results so that in the future, if any researcher wants to expand or replicate the study, they will have something to base their results on. For instance, by knowing the mean and standard deviation, researchers can see if their results are significant and get an idea of what additional variables impact their results. Additionally, what was good about report two is the inclusion of “Table 1” (Colliver et al., 2021, P 6) in which the skills used in the procedure were listed out in an easy-to-read manner. As for the readability overall of the materials and methods section, I would conclude that report one has a slightly more convincing materials and methods section because of how the authors first stated the exact tests they were going to conduct in small paragraphs and explained how it was to be conducted before moving onto the actual procedure. For instance, “SES, HLE, Literacy interest, Emergent literacy, in the letter knowledge subtest, in the phoneme isolation subtest, in the rhyme awareness subtest, and in the British Picture Vocabulary Scales III,” (by Carroll et al., 2019, P 5) where all the tests that they had prepared and administered. Then the researchers explained how the data was collected in the procedure section. I believe that the author explained the materials and methods in small increments to clearly depict what was being done as well as to show how simple but accurate each procedure was. If we compare report one to report two, report two did not previously explain the tests, and instead explained it throughout a couple of long paragraphs which can be overwhelming to the reader. I’m not quite sure why the author chose to do it this way, but I can assume it is to explain the procedure in a linear timeline fashion from how permission was granted for the study, to how parental consent was gotten, how follow up tests were conducted, and so on and so forth until the study was concluded.
The fifth component of the lab report is the results section. In this section, all the results found are summarized and any important findings like trends using text and graphics like tables, graphs, and diagrams were stated. In the results section, authors should omit irrelevant data, explain why it’s irrelevant and to not discuss or interpret the data. Both reports, included formulas and mathematical terms as well as the use of graphs, tables, and charts to showcase the important trends found in the data. I believe that report one is slightly more convincing because the authors raise up questions like “What is the bivariate relation between literacy interest, HLE, SES and emergent literacy?” (Carroll et al., 2019, P 7) and “Can literacy interest, HLE and SES make a unique contribution (beyond the influences of the other predictors) to emergent literacy?” (Carroll et al., 2019, P 8) to state the major trends found.
The sixth component of the lab report is the discussion, also known as the analysis. This is where the author interprets the results and discusses their results of their hypotheses(s) discussed in the introduction. In addition, the discussion is also where the author(s) discuss the limitations to their data and how they anticipate the data can be used by future researchers, parents, and institutions. Both reports start off with presenting the most important findings which include the major trends, different statistics in line with their data and limitations to their experiments as well as multiple explanations to the results that each respective researchers got from the data. For instance, in report one, there are a couple of explanations for literacy interest amongst young children. For instance, “these children are in formal schooling but spend much of their day in free-low play with a variety of educationally relevant activities to choose from” being the first explanation, and “letter knowledge, phonological awareness and vocabulary minimizes measurement error, allowing more variance to be explained” (Carroll et al., 2019, P 9). In report two, what was notable was the acknowledgment that there could have been potential biases/ “hindrances” that will need to be taken care of in future experiments. For instance, “We also did not control for phonological awareness or rapid naming deficits, both of which have been identified as potential hindrances in interventions (Nelson, Benner, and Gonzalez 2003). Future replications will need to measure for such and other …” (by Colliver et al., 2021, P 13). By stating these parameters, the researchers then lay down the groundwork for future researchers to prevent problematic or skewed data to have more accurate results.
The seventh component of the lab report is the conclusion. In the conclusion, the author(s) summarize their main points covered by the report in one or two paragraphs as well as reaffirming the importance of their research. Both (Carroll et al., 2019) and (Colliver et al., 2021) summarized their main points and introduced suggestions on how their findings can impact young children and how they receive their education towards literacy.
After annotating and analyzing both reports, I believe that lab report 1 and lab report 2 follow the eight components of the lab report listed in the textbook well. There were some differences in how the information was structured and introduced to the reader however that did not impact the overall report. I personally enjoyed reading report 1 more due to the breakdown of the introduction and the materials and methods section which really set me up to understand the rest of the report.
References
Carroll, J. M., Holliman, A. J., Weir, F., & Baroody, A. E. (2019). Literacy interest, home literacy environment and emergent literacy skills in preschoolers. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(1), 150–161. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1111/1467-9817.12255
Colliver, Y., Arguel, A., & Parrila, R. (2021). Formal literacy practices through play: exposure to adult literacy practices increases child-led learning and interest. International Journal of Early Years Education, 29(1), 6–24. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1080/09669760.2020.1779668
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