Tested Studies for Laboratory Teaching (ABLE Proceedings)

Title:

Beyond the Lab Report: Using Non-scientific Genres to Facilitate and Assess First-Year Student Learning

Url:

http://www.ableweb.org/volumes/vol-37/v37reprint.php?ch=40

Author:

Neal Abrams
Elizabeth Hogan
Gregory McGee

Author's Address:

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY

Email Address:

eshogan@esf.edu

Description: Many of our first-year students come to us without having written (or read) a lab report and are
understandably daunted by this “new” field-specific genre of writing. As a result those initial forays into
the genre often fail to accurately reflect what students have learned through their primary research, and
present challenges in assessing an individual student’s mastery of the content or in determining how
successfully a given experiment facilitated students’ collective learning. As first-year students develop
proficiency in the genre, their formal lab report writing can be supplemented with other more familiar, nonscientific
genres (informal responses, essays, letters, oral presentations, and even children’s books or comic
strips) geared to public audiences. Allowing students to share or develop their knowledge of biological
concepts through other forms or low stakes “writing to learn” exercises might permit them to more
confidently communicate what they’ve come to understand through their experiments; prepare them to
write more detailed, analytical lab reports; and open possibilities for discussing best practices for
communicating science to public audiences. Presenters will share strategies they’ve used with first-year STEM students, and participants will share and discuss other options for using non-scientific genres of
writing in laboratory courses.

Keywords:

writing
assessment

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

Format:

pdf