EE 361L Lab Report Format

EE 361L is a writing intensive (WI) course which has substantial writing assignments. The purpose of the WI requirement is to provide EE students with more practice to write technical documents. Proper communication of technical ideas is essential in the industrial environment. For many practicing engineers, a significant fraction of their time (if not most of their time) is spent on writing reports, participating in conferences/meetings, and giving presentations. As one would expect, the success and effectiveness of an engineer depends on his/her communication skills.

In this document, we will briefly discuss what is expected of a lab report. The report should clearly and concisely describe a technical task (i.e., the lab assignment) that has been accomplished. The report should be written so that it is clearly understandable to an EE student, who may have taken EE 361 but not the EE 361L lab. It should be self-contained so that the student can follow it without extensive knowledge of the lab manual. Thus, it should be user friendly. In addition, the report should detail the contribution of the team and contributions of the individual team members.

Here are the items that should be included in the lab reports.

A description of what this report is about
Motivation (optional)
What are the objectives of the assignment?
What has been accomplished?
What are the contributions of the team and individual members to the success of the project?
Backgound material, such as modeling information, previous work, etc.
Organization of report, explaining what's in each section.
Describe the lab experiments and results
Describe any problems or surprising results, and how you dealt with them.
Make any conclusions, and summarize and interpret results wherever appropriate.
Concluding statements including summary of task, and any suggestions for future work.
References (bibliography), e.g., reference to the lab handout. The IEEE style for referencing should be followed (see below for a link to a description of the style). Include the reference to the lab assignment manual.

The report should be formatted as follows:

Margins and Spacing: The document should be prepared for 8.5x11 inch paper and maintain the following margins: text width 6.5 inches with 1.25 inch left margin and 1.00 inch right margin, and text height 9.75 inches with 0.5 inch top margin and 0.75 inch bottom margin. Fonts should be Times-Roman or comparable style. Use font size of 12 points, except for the title which can be between 12 and 18 point. Text should be double spaced.
Title and Stuff: The document should start with a title at the top of the first page and left justified. An example title would be "Report for Fall 2002 EE 361L Lab Assignment X". Three lines below the title, should be the author's name prefixed by "Author: ". On the next line, should be the names of the group members on one line separated by commas and prefixed by "Group Members:". Two lines below that will be the date when the document was prepared. Two lines below the date will be the beginning of the rest of the report, which should be the Introduction section.
Sections: The rest of the report should be organized into sections with possible subsections. Note that any technical document should be composed of an Introduction, followed by the Body, and then the Conclusions. The Introduction and Conclusions should have their own section. The Body is one or more sections. Each section and subsection should have a number and title. The Introduction and Conclusions sections are typically titled "Introduction" and "Conclusions," respectively. The numbers for sections are 1, 2, ... Thus, the Introduction is section 1 and its title should be "1 Introduction". Subsections have numbers too so that the numbers of the subsections of Section X should be X.1, X.2, ....
References: After the Conclusions section, there should be a list of references. The list should have a title "References". Properly reference everything (you may also reference the lab handout). Use the IEEE Style of referencing. For a nice description of the style from the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore click here
Figures and Tables: Have figures and tables centered and within the margins of the document. They should be clear and labeled. They should be numbered and have captions. They should be placed after their first reference in the text.
Technical Terms. Italicize and define unfamiliar technical terms. This helps to make the document user-friendly.

A possible organization (although not the only one) is

Introduction: includes above items 1-6, although background material could be in its own section
Experimental Results: includes above items 7-10.
Conclusions: includes above item 11.
References: includes above item 12.