Why Should We Teach Scientific Writing?

Good communication skills are essential for 21st century STEM workers. They cut across STEM fields and are highly sought by employers independent of discipline or field of study. Job skills aside, good scientific communication skills help students rely less on intuition-based thinking and more on evidence-based thinking. They are better prepared to evaluate personal choices, societal issues, and larger policies that have deep connections to science and technology.

So why focus specifically on improving scientific writing skills?

1. The scientific community documents and shares knowledge mainly in written forms.
2. Writing helps students understand how to organize ideas so they tell a clear story, which makes it easier for them to communicate their ideas other ways like visually or when speaking.
3. Scientific writing skills do not develop in a vacuum. Writing also builds associated skills like critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and argumentation.

 

Why Is Teaching Scientific Writing So HARD?

There are many reasons, but three stand out.

 

  

 

Class Sizes/Teacher Workload

Scientific writing is a difficult and time-consuming skill to teach. Students need repeated opportunities to write drafts, get actionable feedback, then make further refinements to become proficient. Disciplinary guidelines for first-year college writing instruction programs recommend limiting writing groups to 15-20 students per section, and no more than 60 students for each instructor in a semester. Yet introductory BIO100 courses regularly enroll dozens or hundreds of students. Meeting with small groups to discuss work in progress and providing meaningful individualized feedback is simply not possible.

When introductory BIO100 courses DO include have a scientific writing element, it often takes a back seat to content coverage. Writing becomes an incidental skill that student may or may not “pick up along the way.”

Another common response to the lack of time in lecture is to make writing part of the lab curriculum. This creates new problems, since labs often are led by teaching assistants whose own writing skills and experiences are limited.

 

Limited Instructor Training/Knowledge

STEM faculty and teaching assistants are poorly equipped to guide novice writers. Very few have any training in scientific writing pedagogy or know what WAC/WID best practices are. They have some prior writing experiences they can call on to guide them, but this is not a reliable substitute for formal training. Instructors who rely on their own past experiences are more likely to focus on writing features that are specific to their discipline rather than cross-cutting foundational skills. How they give feedback also is likely to reflect how they were taught, not what we know to be best practice.  

STEM teachers do not need to create their own writing curriculum. Over 50% of colleges and universities have some form of Writing in the Disciplines, Write to Learn, or Writing Across the Curriculum (WID/WTL/WAC) program that is part of their general education sequence. The WAC/WID community has established central teaching principles that are based on >40 years of evidence and experience which we can build upon.

For example, we know that students need feedback that is focused, individualized, and as impactful as possible. It is widely assumed that this means they need copious, detailed comments and corrections. In fact multiple WAC/WID studies have found novice student writers can only process a limited number of comments. Novices also tend to treat all revisions as having equal value, so focus on the smallest, easiest corrections first and avoid larger, more complex revisions. Students make greater learning gains when instructors avoid telling students what to correct (“copy editing”), and take a coaching-oriented approach where they provide comments that encourage student reflection and self-editing rather than prescribe specific changes. Eliminating copy corrections leaves students with no choice but to work on the higher-value structural revisions first.

 

Instructor Resistance

STEM instructors may value scientific writing skills yet still be unwilling to make it a priority. Reasons can include:

• “I don’t have time to develop something new.”
• “I don’t have spare class time to spend teaching writing.”
• “Students should learn how to write elsewhere.”

These attitudes can be very resistant to change. For example, despite nationwide multi-year efforts to promote interactive, inquiry- and skills-centered teaching, many faculty still prioritize content delivery, not development of students’ disciplinary thinking and process skills.

Even faculty who are motivated to innovate can find it hard to exchange prior instructional habits for new ones, then sustain those changes. Having a professional peer as a role model is helpful, but does not guarantee they will succeed. In many ways it is easier for graduate students to adopt learner-centered writing instruction, because their personal teaching practices are still in flux. A more effective strategy for changing faculty instructional practices may be to target and train future faculty who then act as change agents.

 

---

Where to Learn More

1. Anderman, E.M., 2011. The Teaching and Learning of Twenty-First Century Skills. Presented at the National Research Council Board on Testing and Assessment’s Workshop on Assessment of 21st Century Skills, Irvine, CA, p. 31.
2. Bahls, P., 2012. Student writing in the quantitative disciplines: a guide for college faculty, 1st ed. ed, The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
3. Bane, S., 2017. Best Practices for Teaching Writing in STEM: A Literature Survey and Case Study of San José  State University’s 100W Courses in STEM Disciplines (Faculty-in-Residence Report). San José State University Writing Center, San José, CA.
4. Clughen, L., Connell, M., 2011. Writing and resistance: Reflections on the practice of embedding writing in the curriculum. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 11, 333–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022211429543
5. Fellows, N.J., 1994. A window into thinking: Using student writing to understand conceptual change in science learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 31, 985–1001. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660310911
6. Fry, C.L., 2014. Achieving Systemic Change: A Sourcebook for Advancing and Funding Undergraduate STEM Education. Association of American Colleges and Universities, Washington, D.C.
7. Harris, M., 1979. The overgraded paper: Another case of more is less., in: Stanford, G., National Council of Teachers of English (Eds.), How to Handle the Paper Load, Classroom Practices in Teaching English: 1979-1980. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, Ill, pp. 91–94.
8. Libarkin, J., Ording, G., 2012. The utility of writing assignments in undergraduate bioscience. CBE Life Sci Educ 11, 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.11-07-0058
9. Moskovitz, C., Kellogg, D., 2005. Primary Science Communication in the First-Year Writing Course. College Composition and Communication 57, 307–334.
10. Reynolds, J.A., Thaiss, C., Katkin, W., Thompson, R.J.J., 2012. Writing-to-learn in undergraduate science education: a community-based, conceptually driven approach. CBE Life Sci Educ 11, 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.11-08-0064
11. Starke-Meyerring, D., Paré, A., 2011. The roles of writing in knowledge societies: Questions, exigencies, and implications for the study and teaching of writing., in: Writing in Knowledge Societies. pp. 3–28.
12. Szymanski, E.A., 2014. Instructor feedback in upper-division biology courses: Moving from spelling and syntax to scientific discourse. 11.
13. Underwood, J.S., Tregidgo, A.P., 2006. Improving student writing through effective feedback: Best practices and recommendations. Journal of Teaching Writing 22, 73–97.