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About this tool
Build an IMRaD lab report skeleton with word budgets per section, a what-goes-where checklist and a percent error calculator.
A lab report structure guide lays out the IMRaD skeleton — Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion — and assigns each section a word budget, a grammatical tense and a checklist of what a marker expects to find there. It also runs the two calculations a results section always needs: percent error, (measured − accepted) ÷ accepted × 100, and percent difference when there is no accepted value. Written for school practicals, undergraduate lab courses and formal journal-shaped reports, with the abstract capped at the 250-word APA ceiling most rubrics reuse.
Open Lab Report Structure Guide on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Each section lists what a marker looks for, so nothing is left to guesswork.
Allocations sum exactly to your target and give the discussion the largest share.
Percent error and percent difference are calculated from your own numbers, with divide-by-zero handled.
IMRaD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion — the standard order for reporting original experimental work. The introduction says why the experiment was done, methods says how, results says what happened, and discussion says what it means; abstract, references and appendices sit around that core.
Percent error = (measured value − accepted value) ÷ accepted value × 100. Measuring g as 9.62 m/s² against the accepted 9.81 m/s² gives −1.94%, a result 1.94% below the accepted value. If there is no accepted value, use percent difference: |a − b| ÷ ((a + b) ÷ 2) × 100.
Aim for 150-250 words. APA 7th edition recommends that range and most course rubrics and journals reuse the 250-word ceiling, so an abstract does not get longer just because the report does.
Methods and results go in the past tense, usually passive — the solution was heated, the mass was recorded — because they describe what was done on one occasion. Established theory and your interpretation in the discussion go in the present tense, because they are claims about how things are.