Tested Studies for Laboratory Teaching (ABLE Proceedings)

Title:

Building a Student Community to Improve Student Writing Skills

Url:

http://www.ableweb.org/volumes/vol-37/v37reprint.php?ch=30

Author:

Author's Address:

Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, 85 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester NY 14623 USA

Email Address:

dxcsse@rit.edu

Description: First year college students find scientific writing difficult. They often take a first year writing class, but the
style and content required in laboratory reports is new to them. In addition, scientific disciplines approach
student writing differently, and there is often no systematic approach to teaching science writing across the
curriculum, and no expectations for progress from year to year. As scientists, we communicate by reading
and writing papers. Reading papers is daunting for first year students, and writing like a scientist is even
harder. At first, students find reading papers very difficult. The language is strange, they don’t understand
the jargon; papers are long and quite difficult to follow. They wonder how they will ever belong to the
group that actually writes these documents! Introducing students to scientific literature early and using
suitable examples helps them to model and improve their writing.

Keywords:

student writing skills

Topic:

Teaching Tools and Techniques

BEN Subject/Discipline Taxonomy:

Teaching Tools and Techniques

Learning Resource Type:

Teaching strategies & guidelines (DCMI Type Vocabulary)

Context:

Undergraduate lower division 13-14
Undergraduate upper division 15-16

Format:

pdf