Artifact #4: Writing Across the Curriculum Assignment
In Spring 2018, I took Delta and the Writing Center's Writing Across the Curriculum course to expand my knowledge on implementing effective writing assignments. I was interested in this due to the success of using short informal writing assignments in the Exploring Biology course across the semester. We received strong positive feedback from the students for those assignments, so this made me interested to learn how to better construct assignments in a course.
The major assignment for the course is to create a new or revise a writing assignment or sequence of writing assignments for a course that you've taught or will teach in the future. I was inspired to create a writing assignment focused on developing lab reports for a potential future course that uses the style of a traditional scientific publication. The goal is not only for students get practice in this writing style, but also so become more familiar with the structure of scientific literature for future work. I find many students, including myself as an undergraduate, failed to understand the reason why an instructor would ask a student to create a laboratory report due to the lack of clear learning goals. By creating a more structured lab report that required students to articulate the "why" of the assignment would better engage their critical thinking skills.
As preparation for creating this assignment, I went to a workshop by the Writing Center called "The Five Secrets For Writing A Successful Undergraduate Lab Report", read a case study on how to improve scientific writing in Biology, and meet with BioCore teaching staff about how they structure their lab reports in their courses. Below is the draft for this assignment and will be updated as we go through the feedback process:
The major assignment for the course is to create a new or revise a writing assignment or sequence of writing assignments for a course that you've taught or will teach in the future. I was inspired to create a writing assignment focused on developing lab reports for a potential future course that uses the style of a traditional scientific publication. The goal is not only for students get practice in this writing style, but also so become more familiar with the structure of scientific literature for future work. I find many students, including myself as an undergraduate, failed to understand the reason why an instructor would ask a student to create a laboratory report due to the lack of clear learning goals. By creating a more structured lab report that required students to articulate the "why" of the assignment would better engage their critical thinking skills.
As preparation for creating this assignment, I went to a workshop by the Writing Center called "The Five Secrets For Writing A Successful Undergraduate Lab Report", read a case study on how to improve scientific writing in Biology, and meet with BioCore teaching staff about how they structure their lab reports in their courses. Below is the draft for this assignment and will be updated as we go through the feedback process:
Reflections
While making this assignment and completing these writing expeditions (such as the workshop above), I had some ideas for what I would like to include with a writing assignment. The first was making sure to provide templates for students to use. I found that including both examples of what I DON’T want to see as well as a strong example are beneficial to students to better understand your expectations. Since students come to your class with a variety of prior knowledge and experiences, you can yield a variety of results if you are not transparent with your students about the expectations of the assignment. What was a "good" assignment in another course may not be "good" in yours due to differences in standards. The same should be done for graphs, like with the example of a resource of bad graphs from peer reviewed literature to show even scientists make mistakes.
Another technique I learned from the course would be using the scaffolding approach, by taking a large assignment and breaking it down into smaller assignments that build off each other. We used this approach in Exploring Biology for their poster project and experienced positive results; therefore I wanted to do something similar in other assignments in the future. While this assignment may not be large enough to implement this approach, I tried to break down what goes into each component of the assignment and relate how the different pieces work together to create a final piece. This should also be reflected in the rubric, where focus on the piece as a whole, not on each individual aspect. However, the assignment could be adapted to be scaffolded, such as having students complete the introduction and methods pieces before the lab and the remainder after the lab. This may or may not be needed due how advanced the course is.
I also included things in the assignment that I felt were important if I were to ever teach a laboratory course. I made sure to outline my expectations for a lab report at the start of the assignment, and make it easy for students to reference. Many students struggle with basic questions such as who the audience is, what is the general purpose of developing this lab report or the genre, so if this is clearly stated students have a better alignment of expectations of the course. This is crucial for a repetitive assignment throughout the semester and usually is a large part of the course's grade. Another thing I incorporated was having students to use the general public as the audience in order to improve students’ communicating their science to the public. I find with lab reports that if students are able to regurgitate as much as possible from what's given to them, they aren't really learning much. By asking them to simplify the topic to make it approachable, students would have to use critical thinking skills to appropriately describe the scenario.
Another technique I learned from the course would be using the scaffolding approach, by taking a large assignment and breaking it down into smaller assignments that build off each other. We used this approach in Exploring Biology for their poster project and experienced positive results; therefore I wanted to do something similar in other assignments in the future. While this assignment may not be large enough to implement this approach, I tried to break down what goes into each component of the assignment and relate how the different pieces work together to create a final piece. This should also be reflected in the rubric, where focus on the piece as a whole, not on each individual aspect. However, the assignment could be adapted to be scaffolded, such as having students complete the introduction and methods pieces before the lab and the remainder after the lab. This may or may not be needed due how advanced the course is.
I also included things in the assignment that I felt were important if I were to ever teach a laboratory course. I made sure to outline my expectations for a lab report at the start of the assignment, and make it easy for students to reference. Many students struggle with basic questions such as who the audience is, what is the general purpose of developing this lab report or the genre, so if this is clearly stated students have a better alignment of expectations of the course. This is crucial for a repetitive assignment throughout the semester and usually is a large part of the course's grade. Another thing I incorporated was having students to use the general public as the audience in order to improve students’ communicating their science to the public. I find with lab reports that if students are able to regurgitate as much as possible from what's given to them, they aren't really learning much. By asking them to simplify the topic to make it approachable, students would have to use critical thinking skills to appropriately describe the scenario.