Science (teaching) Friday

Its not like we even get these NPR programs here at the correct time of week or day - Science Friday is being broadcast when it is already Friday night here. But I've been working on a physics lab TA training seminar this week, and I found an article I really like. It is a collaboration between chemistry and English professors at Seattle University (Alaimo et. al, 2009), and the topic is helping college students learn to write like scientists. Basically, they argue that writing like a scientist (and I'd add speaking like one) goes hand in hand with thinking like a scientist. The motivation for the paper is the difficulty the chemists saw their students having writing up a professional looking senior thesis in chemistry, even thought these students had done many lab courses and had to write up reports for them.

If you've taken a science lab class, chances are you know that lab reports are a weird little genre unto themselves, having little or nothing to do with actual scientific writing of the kind that goes into journal articles. The authors make a great point about this that is obvious once they've stated it - students who learn to write lab reports are learning to write for a totally different purpose than what a research article has. The audience is the TA who will grade the work, the data and experiments are preselected, there is almost no gathering of multiple instances of the same data, and, let's be honest, almost all unexpected results are chalked up to "human error" and not really explained by the students. So why should we be surprised that students who know how to write a lab report have no idea how to write like scientists?

The authors discuss how they redesigned a yearlong chemistry lab course to mirror actual science data acquisition, analysis, and writeup. And they start with the easiest (e.g. lowest Bloom's taxonomy level) cognitive tasks like writing up the data results and analysis, followed by the harder (higher level) cognitive tasks like the discussion and introduction. They spend time on issues of audience (a person with similar or slightly less chemistry knowledge than you, the student), and purpose of these different sections.

Sounds like a great idea to me.