by Huck Bagby
As my first semester teaching is coming to a close, I find now an opportune time to reflect. I am writing this just after grading the final version of the large experimental report students were asked to write in their lab groups. As my students were mostly new to scientific writing, it has been really exciting to see how they have improved in the field. One of the big challenges I noticed in writing is the big picture focus on the solution instead of the process. While conveying results is very important, it is just as important to effectively communicate the process of achieving those results. At first many of the students tended to ignore the process for the results in their writing, but by their final reports, they had a strong grasp of the importance of writing the process of their experiments.
I give a large amount of credit for this to the structure of the class. Instead of throwing students into the deep end of scientific writing, students were exposed to and given practice on different sections of a scientific report each week. The first writing activity students were assigned was just writing scientific questions. This allowed for a very short simple assignment that had students begin to think about the purpose of scientific writing. The following assignments on different sections of scientific writing allowed students to build both their experience and comfort level with writing experimental reports without being overwhelmed by both trying to tackle every section at once and helped increase practice without greatly increasing the writing workload of students. After learning each section, students were given the opportunity to conduct their own experiment and write their own experimental report.
I found that students by far struggled the most with writing the methods section in both practice and later drafts of their reports. While initially surprised by this, I soon came to the realization that not only had students not had as much transferrable writing experience as with the discussion and introduction, but had also been taught bad habits by being required to follow strict lab protocols in high school. Past experience had students writing methods that were very instruction focused in step-by-step format. In actuality, methods are often written more as a story of what you did and the reasoning behind it. You are not only comprehensively describing what you did in the experiment so that it can be recreated, but you are also making an argument for why you performed the experiment how you did. This second aspect of “why” is what I found students struggled with the most. This goes back to their big picture focus on the final results over the process.
I found that the most effective way to teach them to focus on the process is through feedback on their assignments. Instead of only pointing out what needs to be fixed and offering possible solutions, I found that asking questions to the students in their feedback pointed them to the process. I believe this was effective because it forced students to look back at their process. For example, asking “why did you do this” for a step on their methods or “how does this work” for a concept not fully explained in their introduction forces students to look at their writing from the audience’s perspective.
