3 Minute Step Test – Lab Report

1. Introduction
-Give background information on the topic of your experiment(3 minute step test); write about what is already known about the heart rate and the effect of physical activity on the heart rate in the research literature.
-What is left unanswered and what is the significance of your experiment?
-What are your goals (objectives)? The aim of your study should be clearly stated
immediately after discussing the basic references.
-Mention your experimental design.
-State the hypothesis and your prediction(s) in the last paragraph.
-Dont forget to cite throughout the text (author, year), for example: (Jensen, 2006) or
(Stevens and Bonvecchio, 2001) or (Zhou et al., 2010).
-Written in present tense, and past tense if mentioning previously found data.

2. Materials and Methods
-Explain the procedure so someone who needs to repeat this experiment clearly understands all the steps (replications included) and will be able to repeat it in the same exact way.
-Written in paragraph form. Do not use bullet points!
-Do not list all the materials one by one include them in your procedure description
(leave out the unnecessary details).
-Specify all materials and add their source (e.g. manufacturer, catalog number). Mention the number of participants and specific groups.
-Include what controls were used in the experiment.
-Explain how data was collected.
-Explain how data analysis was done (including the statistics).
-Written in passive voice and past tense (e.g. Participants heart rate was measured )

3. Results
-Write a summary paragraph emphasizing important patterns or trends that can be seen in your tables and graphs (do not list one by one all of the results from your tables and
graphs).
-State whether increase or decrease in specific values was recorded but do not explain or
discuss why you got those particular findings, do not draw major conclusions (leave that
for the Discussion section).
-Present your data, illustrate your findings, in the form of tables and figures. Throughout
the text refer the reader to see the appropriate figures and tables by inserting (Figure 1)
or (Fig. 2A), or (Table 1) at the end of the sentence in which you mention them, or by
inserting as seen in Fig. 1. in the text. Tables should show averages and standard
deviations for each of the experimental conditions. Figures graphs should display data
from the tables.
-Remember to show a natural progression of how results were collected from the
collection of raw data to the illustration of analyzed data in figures.
-Correctly label those figures and tables. Take a look at the figures and tables from the
primary scientific papers you chose as your references. Your figure has to have a caption
that includes a specific title and a brief, but descriptive, explanation of the figure (a
figure legend). Table captions are located above the table, while figure captions are
below the figures (graphs, images). Table captions tend to be less wordy and can
sometimes have a note underneath the table.

4. Discussion
-Use past tense to state what you found out in your experiments, whether your results
support the hypothesis, or your results falsified the hypothesis.
-Interpret your findings and discuss their significance.
-As you explain what your findings mean, mention relevant figures and tables again.
Draw conclusions and relate your data/findings to what has already been done in this
field.
-Compare your data to findings from published peer-reviewed papers to prove the
results you got are valid (or not).
-NO QUOTES! You need to paraphrase the information you got from your sources and
cite the author(s) of those papers you cannot just put the text from those scientific
papers in quotations and cite the authors because that does not show us that you
actually understood the experiments and the results from the papers you are citing.
-Discuss the limitations of your experimental design, explain why something went
wrong and what you could have done differently.
-Propose future experiments.
-Talk about implications of your research.

References
-6 journal papers minimum primary scientific articles (4 at least) and secondary
scientific articles (review papers). You should try to find more recent papers, published
within the last 10 20 years. If you have more than 6 sources, one of your sources can
be older.
-You cannot cite any websites, your Biology textbook or any other textbook, handbook
or lab manual for this assignment.
-All sources need to be correctly cited and put in alphabetical order.
When citing throughout the text, if you have 3 or more authors you should write (Rossi
et al., 2014), but in the References section you have to write all their last names and first name initials.
-Use the APA citation style to write the components of a reference in the correct order:
author(s), year, title of the paper, name of the scientific journal, volume (issue), pages.
Since nowadays all papers are available online, your last component should be the DOI
or URL (https://guides.zsr.wfu.edu/c.php?g=34537&p=221055). Species names, title of
the journal and volume should be italicized.