Summarize the problem and methodology behind your research in one or two sentences. For example, if you planned to study the marketability of different flavors of cat food and set out to discover what flavors cats prefer, your summary may include an outline of this objective as well as the tests you undertook. Or perhaps you offered dishes of food to several breeds of domestic cats and discovered that the cats finished the dishes of chicken-flavored cat food but ate only a few bites of the dishes of turkey and lamb-flavored food, and none of the salmon-flavored food.
Interpret your test results in a sentence or two. These interpretations should take the results one step further and speculate as to what they might mean. For example, you may speculate that since the cats ate more of the chicken-flavored cat food, chicken is the most popular flavor among your tested group of cats.
Offer some implications of your research in a sentence or two. For example, if you have concluded chicken-flavored cat food is the favorite among your tested group of cats, you could suggest that chicken-flavored cat food might be the best-selling cat food on the market, if people buy cat food according to what their cat seems to enjoy.
Outline any surprising aspects of your research results and what they might mean. For example, if the cats in your experiment seemed to dislike the salmon-flavored cat food, identify this as an unexpected result. Hypothesize a few reasons for your surprising result. For example, perhaps cats did not like the particular brand's synthetic fish flavoring, or the food did not have a strong enough scent to attract the cats to it. These surprising aspects can also provide avenues for further research projects.
Review your conclusions section. Ask yourself if there is a single message about your research that is revealed by reading the conclusion. Since the conclusions section is the ending to a long paper or lab report, it should leave the reader with the main point you want to convey about your testing and results. For example, you might want your reader to put down your paper with the idea that cat food manufacturers should focus on producing chicken-flavored food in order to sell more units of product.