Welcome to the STEM Writing Project!

Scientific communication helps students learn to state problems and present claims, then summarize evidence and their reasoning to support those claims. Regular writing practice with individualized feedback builds critical and applied thinking process skills that are transferable to nearly all STEM careers. Unfortunately, most students don't get enough opportunities to learn and practice scientific writing.

 

  

 

We Can Help!

We designed and tested a Six Elements Method (SEM) for teaching scientific writing in large, multi-section introductory biology (and other STEM) courses. SEM combines educational research and proven practices from the Writing Across the Curriculum/ Writing in Disciplines (WAC/WID) literature, more than a decade of local observations and informal studies, and NSF-supported research.

 

 

 

Six Elements in (About) Six Minutes

This video summarizes how SEM works:

 

 

Getting Around

Each of the Six Elements has its own landing page in the main menu at left. These pages summarize how each component works, and provide links to existing files and materials from this project. Sub-pages describe more specific activities and resources.

The Assessment landing page summarizes our approach to both student and project evaluation. Specific assessment tools and projects have separate sub-pages under the Assessment landing page that provide links to existing files and materials for that activity.

Each Element plus Assessment has its own project space where members of the community can:

• Learn about new resources being developed;
• Collaborate with others on a sub-project;
• Offer new ideas; and
• Be part of an ongoing conversation about teaching scientific writing!

Use the Project tab in the main menu to reach the list of all active project spaces. They also can be accessed using the links on the corresponding landing pages.

Pages with "D" after the title are still in the draft stage.

Looking for code and data files from our research and development projects? Those are posted on our other home on GitHub.

 

Join our group to access all of our resources!