A Writing Assignment That Changes Attitudes in Biology Classes

Abstract

OONE of the biggest challenges in teaching biology is the attitude toward science that many students bring to class. Many of the students enrolled in introductory biology classes at the high school or college level are there for no particularly positive reason, and may even be openly hostile or apprehensive about the course. The writing assignments I have been using since 1992 in introductory biology for nonmajors at the university level have been successful in helping me help my students become personally involved and interested in biology. These assignments would be equally useful in secondary school classes where similar attitudes prevail among the students. These writing assignments have several specific goals. The first goal is helping students to see that the course content is of interest to them professionally, regardless of career plans, and personally. A second goal is helping students to realize that science is done by people who were not born scientists, but learned to do science through years of hard work. The human face of science often gets lost in the process of learning the details of cell structure and function. Finally, this assignment is also useful in meeting the general goal of encouraging writing in all subject areas, although writing skills per se are not a particular focus of the assignment. Similar assignments have been described for chemistry courses (Burke 1995), biology courses (Kirkland 1997) and environmental science courses (Gibson 1996), although none combines exactly the same elements as the one described here. In all of these cases, the intent is to provide outlets for personal and creative approaches to learning about science, beyond the usual exams and quizzes that are traditionally used to assess learning. The intent of the assignments described here is not writing to learn in the sense that the writing is designed to reinforce specific course content or writing skills (Moore 1993, 1994a, 1994b), but rather writing to produce and reinforce specific attitudes about the course and the subject.