We are now finished with all of the essential elements of an experimental design and test report, except for the single most important thing: what we discovered/found/determined from the work!

Have any of you picked up a paper and jumped to the end just to read the conclusions/findings? It’s ok. Many do.

The goals for this section of the report are to:

  1. Review the outcomes of the experimental work as efficiently as possible while maintaining a narrative voice/flow.
  2. Emphasize the key insights and takeaways resulting from the effort.
  3. Provide justifications for future work and improvements to the status quo.

If done well, this last bullet goes a long way towards self-fulfilling your job security in the most open, honest, and respectable way possible. Make sure to do this with emphasis, it’s clear when people are board at the end of a project and losing momentum — so it’s clear who shouldn’t get more work!

The other places people scan for findings are the title and abstract. Notice that we’ve waited until the end of the report to go back and write these frontmatter items — how can we provide an efficient summary of our results if we don’t know what we’ve found until the end? If we knew what would happen, we wouldn’t need the study/report or an engineer to do it!

Here’s a basic abstract template that flows with what you’ve already accomplished:

  1. 1st Sentence: tell everyone why you need to do this (motivation/problem). This could include the most convincing statistic/sentence from your introductory section, but you don’t want to demonstrate a lack of effort by just repeating the 1st sentence of the intro.
  2. 2nd Sentence: key gap in existing knowledge/literature that prevents a solution to the problem. Again, this could include the most convincing reference from your literature review, but we wouldn’t want to repeat it verbatim.
  3. 3rd Sentence: the theory/hypothesis/equation that will allow us to fill the gap in understanding that will solve the problem. Though we wouldn’t include the actual equation in the abstract. This sentence should tell us why we still need to do an experiment.
  4. 4th Sentence: the test apparatus/experiment we can evaluate the theory to fill the gap and solve the problem with. What does this novel experiment allow us to do well?
  5. 5th Sentence: the take home message for what was found and why it matters/changes things. This could also inform future work.

These five sentences are not a rigid algorithm but more of a heuristic. If the point is better made in two sentences, do that instead of one. The general progression tends to hold though.

Don’t forget to include tables of contents, figures, references and appendices at the end of your report.

By the end of lab time today you should have the following done:

  1. Complete all of your measurements that you plan to report.
  2. Draft the summary/conclusion section following the above goals.
  3. Complete drafts of the front matter and other ancillary items to help with the report and presentation.

Rubrics for your A project report and presentations are in Canvas. Be ready to practice on Tuesday.