Design and assessment of an assignment-based curriculum to teach scientific writing and scientific peer review

Rainer Ernst Glaser

doi:10.5204/jld.v7i2.202

Abstract

A writing-intensive, upper-level undergraduate course which integrates content, context, collaboration, and communication in a unique fashion, is described. The topic of the seminar is âScientific Writing in Chemistryâ and an assignment-based curriculum was developed to instruct students on best practices in all aspects of science communication and to educate students about the scientific publication process and peer review. To effectively teach students how to understand science, both the content and the process must be included. Peer review is an integral and essential part of the process of science and the peer review tasks in the course described in this paper evolve from rubric-based peer assessments to free-format peer review. The curriculum was developed for a semester-long, three-hour seminar with limited enrolment. The curriculum was taught in the Spring semesters of 2010 - 2014 and enrolment data and results of evaluations collected over four years are presented to demonstrate the success of the implementations

Highlights

Building on a century of general education policy (Boyer & Levine, 1981), the National Science Foundation (NSF, 1996) recommended that STEM teachers:... model good practices that increase learning; start with the student’s experience, but have high expectations within a supportive climate; and build inquiry, a sense of wonder and the excitement of discovery, plus communication and teamwork, critical thinking, and life-long learning skills into learning experiences. (p. iv)Within this learning framework, communication includes literacy (Robinson, McKenna, & Conradi, 2011), which in the 21st century increasingly means scientific literacy (Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010)
We developed Chemistry is in the News (CIITN) to teach chemistry in the context of real-world issues and to expose students to all aspects of science communication
The CIITN activities consist of the study, creation and peer review of online projects based on news articles from the popular press

Summary

Introduction

Building on a century of general education policy (Boyer & Levine, 1981), the National Science Foundation (NSF, 1996) recommended that STEM teachers:. Communication includes literacy (Robinson, McKenna, & Conradi, 2011), which in the 21st century increasingly means scientific literacy (Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010) This requires an appreciation of the scientific process by the general public (Schwartz, 2007) as. We report a more recent curriculum innovation which embraces the spirit and expands on the concepts of CIITN to educate upper-division (third and fourthyear) science majors about the scientific process, scientific writing, scientific peer review, and professional issues. While the curriculum has been developed for students at an American research university, the framework of the assignment-based approach is entirely transferable to other sciences and other educational levels and contexts.

12 A10 13 A11 40

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Conclusion