Writing Effective Lab Report Titles: The Key to Clear Communication

The start of any piece of work needs to be strong and clear, and lab reports are no different. The title and opening paragraph sets the tone for your work, and even if they don’t admit it (as it goes against their training!), teachers are already starting to decide on your final grade as soon as they start reading.

Lab reports are a little different, in that you can actually see if someone appears to understand the experiment from the title, as a good title clearly links the variables. (If you have not yet thought about what the variables of your experiment are, have a look at the lab report overview here, and look at this example lab report). 

Title: The effect of IV on DV. 

The IV and DV come from your variables section, so make sure you have first completed a variables table! Then, use the sentence structure above to write a clear and concise title. Don’t worry about the control variables, or what you used to measure the DV, this is all in the variables section. If you do need to include such details in the title, your teacher will make sure you know.

Imagine you are working in a lab, doing some research on how insects are attracted to sugary foods. When you are searching for other experiments that have done similar things to the experiment you want to do, you don’t want to waste time reading whole lab reports that you aren’t going to use. So the title needs to give enough information to scientists to decide if they want to read further or not. You might choose to read ‘Effect of sugar concentration in marshmallows on number of flies attracted’ but you decide not to read ‘Effect of mass of salt in potato chips on number of potato chips eaten by flies’. Besides the fact that flies would take forever to eat a whole chip, the report and its findings probably aren’t relevant to your experiment. 

Try this:

Look at the following examples of titles and identify the IV and DV for each one, by deciding what was changed (IV) and what was measured (DV). 

The effect of amount of candy on students’ maths test results.

The effect of type of cloud on the length of cows’ nap times.

The effect of number of adverts watched on amount spent on football stickers.

Effect of cheese on mice.

Now try and write three titles using the following information:

How did you do? Did you need the CV column to help you write a clear title? 

Now try and write three titles yourself! Make them as silly as you like and share them with your classmates.

A good title helps to understand exactly what was investigated

How many of the titles above are clear, concise titles? Which one doesn’t really help you understand exactly what was changed or measured?

That’s right, the last one, number 4. “Effect of cheese on mice”. The DV is something to do with cheese, but we’re not sure what. Type of cheese? Amount of cheese? Mouldiness of cheese? 

So, not only does the title tell us what we are changing, it also tells us how. This shows how important it is to complete the variables table properly: you will be far less likely to miss it out of the title if you thought about it and wrote it down at the start. You don’t need to include any units at this point, keep it clear and simple.

“Effect of cheese on mice” also does not tell us much about what we are measuring: ‘effects’ is far too broad a term to measure. If I asked you to measure the effects of TV on plants, would you know what to measure? The effects of cheese might affect the weight of a mouse, its ability to navigate a maze, how high it can jump, or a thousand other things. 

Be specific, a good title tells the reader you understand the experiment, exactly what was changed and exactly what was measured. That’s a great start if you’re looking to get top marks for your work.

A clear research question helps you write a great introduction and conclusion

It may seem like a pointless step, turning the title into a question, but that is all you need to do. Continuing from above, “How does cheese affect mice?”, shows your teacher you know what the IV and DV are, but it will not help you write a good introduction or conclusion. 

A clumsy Research Question will make your life harder, at the start of writing your lab report when you need to do some research, and at the end, when you apply that research to your results. If you know what you are looking for, you will waste far less time looking for, writing down, and referencing the information you find. If the mouse experiment above was actually about finding their way around a maze, and you have written about how cheese is known to make mice eyes shiny, will you get a good mark? If, however, you have written the title and research question well, you will get great marks and have time to go and do other, more important things.

In the conclusion, you move your mark above that of a pass, and into the top bands of lab report assessments. You can start the section by answering the research question. Often, starting to write is the hardest part, so this gives you a boost. The clearer the question, the clearer your answer will be. 

So let’s modify and make the mouse/cheese investigation Research Question clear, and you will be able to see the difference and know where to focus your efforts:

“How does the stinkyness of cheese affect the ability of mice to climb walls?”

So when you do your research, you will have to find out: How the stinkyness of cheese is measured, how mice climb walls, and has anyone else ever linked these two thighs together before? (Probably not!)

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