Designing

a Connected Classroom
Program Students as Editors to
Improve Scientific Writing
Overview

In preparation for this assignment, I reflected on multiple components that I
learned in this course and thought of ways to bring the ideas together. I spend a lot of
my time reflecting on how I can improve my students learning and one area that I have
identified is scientific writing. Lately, I have pondered creative ways that I can address
this gap with technology. My courses have many different written assignments
throughout the semester, however challenges with grading and feedback have always
been a concern for students, especially when multiple teaching assistants are involved
in the process. Over the past couple of years, I have noticed that my own writing has
improved and I attribute this to the fact that I am constantly reviewing and editing the
work of others. This realization led to my desire to design the connected classroom
program outlined below.

My Program

Students would be exposed to frequent mini lessons that would focus on
grammar and scientific writing. As they work through the lessons, they would have to
complete various interactive activities that would solidify the concepts. The lessons
would be kept very short to motivate the students to complete them each week and
they would only focus on one topic at a time. After students completed a few of the
lessons, they would then be expected to act as a student editor where they would put
their learning into practice. To give you a better idea of the type of lesson I would
include for my students, I created a sample using Articulate Storyline. The link below will
only be active for 10 days but that should be enough time for others to check it out!

http://s3.amazonaws.com/tempshare-
stage.storyline.articulate.com/sto_1bbaf4im91uveabn1dhav3u6ng9/story.html

The plan is to use previous student writing submissions as the content that
would need to be edited by the students. Providing these sample passages allows
students to be exposed to common mistakes made by undergraduate science students
with their writing. It also enforces the idea of generating a community of participants
that are all working towards a common pedagogical goal.

One of the major challenges that myself and other educators face when it comes
to instructing scientific writing is that there is not one correct way of approaching of
executing this form of writing. Before moving forward with the lessons and
development of tools, articles such as Gopen and Swan (1990) will be consulted. This
article provides detailed suggestions and principles to increase clarity of writing without
sacrificing the content. The authors emphasize that all writing must keep the reader in
mind and that many interpretations can exist.

Rationale for the Program

Students often struggle with writing and they comment that they do not believe
the level of instruction in this area is emphasized. As university educators, we often
assume that others have prepared our students for the tasks that we assign them and
we take for granted that these skills might be underdeveloped. When students are not
confident in their writing skills, they often procrastinate starting the task and they end
up completing a rushed assignment. Shah et al., (2009) have evaluated the experiences
of novice science researchers and they have identified common difficulties encountered
by this cohort. Specifically, they identified the following four themes: cognitive burden,
group support and mentoring, difficulty distinguishing between content and structure
and backward design of manuscripts. Briefly, the findings of their study demonstrated
that the perception of the writing task differed amongst participants. This is something
that I frequently observe in my classroom some students understand the expectation
and do not struggle to perform it, while others feel lost and unprepared to complete it.
One area that the participants of the Shah (2009) study did agree on was that they
would prefer to work on written assignments in groups. If designed appropriately, I
think that this could be a unique approach for a task that is normally completed
individually. Students and teachers can be leery of group work for various reasons;
however, utilizing more innovative approaches could be beneficial for both parties.
Calibrated peer review (CPR) is a relatively new concept where students are trained on a
specific rubric and they are expected to practice reviewing work before assessing their
peers. Balfour (2013) has identified a method whereby you can offer CPR in a relatively
large classroom setting, especially online, which would be ideal.

One way that students can effectively work in groups for written assignments is
through peer review. To do this, educators must provide proper instruction about peer
review and they must have an organized system to effectively utilize it in the classroom.
Guilford (2001) published an article that described teaching the peer review process to
undergraduate students. The rationale for this was to bring awareness to the peer
review process and the results of the study were improved quality of work as well as
greater awareness of the process. Exposing undergraduate students to this essential
process would be very beneficial because it would create an authentic experience for
them that relates to scientific writing. Miak et al., 2005 have also expressed their
positive experiences regarding manuscript editing as a way of teaching academic
writing, from the perspective of the journal.

Most educators will tell you that it is important to focus on writing for most
undergraduate courses. The problem that exists is that most of the instruction is spent
on the subject-specific information and therefore there is not a lot of time left to
dedicate to writing instruction. One way to get around this is to supplement courses
with online instructions that can be completed at any time by the student. To date,
there have been mixed thoughts about whether the instruction is more effective if it is
delivered in person or online. A study in 2009 evaluated this by randomly assigning
participants from science backgrounds to an on-line writing workshop or standard
writing training that lacked any virtual instruction. The quality of writing and participant
satisfaction was evaluated and it was reported that the on-line writing group scored
higher in these categories (Phadtare et al., 2009).

When considering new pedagogical approaches, I think that it is important to
keep in mind the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. By
implementing online lessons and the student editor tool mentioned, this addresses one
of the essential principles, giving prompt feedback (Chickering and Gamson 1987). I
teach in relatively large classes, which means that it can take a few weeks to turn
written assignments around to students. By the time students receive their assessment
and feedback they are often busy focusing on their next academic task. If we can find a
way to provide effective feedback to students immediately after they perform the task, I
believe this would greatly improve the learning outcome.

Overall, the goal is to educate students about scientific writing by getting them
to complete interactive activities and do a variety of peer review. Ultimately, we also
will want them to have lots of practice writing as well. Currently, my students complete
specific written assignments and I have been struggling with whether or not they are
appropriate. For this I will have to reflect on my program and course outcomes and
determine what we want the students to walk away with when they graduate. If the
goal is just to get them to be better writers then perhaps we need to think more
creatively, with what we assign them. Writing to learn (WTL) involves short, impromptu,
or informal writing and it has been demonstrated to have success in multiple disciplines,
even the sciences (Reynolds et al., 2012). If we can provide the students with tasks that
they are interested in and even give them options and choice then I believe this will also
contribute to their success with scientific writing. The key is to get them writing and
reflecting frequently.


Work Cited


Balfour, S. P. (2013). Assessing writing in MOOCs: Automated essay scoring and
calibrated peer review (tm). Research & Practice in Assessment, 8.

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in
undergraduate education. AAHE bulletin, 3, 7.

Gopen, G. D., & Swan, J. A. (1990). The science of scientific writing. American Scientist,
78(6), 550-558.

Guilford, W. H. (2001). Teaching peer review and the process of scientific writing.
Advances in physiology education, 25(3), 167-175.

Miak, A., Marui, M., & Marui, A. (2005). Manuscript editing as a way of teaching
academic writing: Experience from a small scientific journal. Journal of second language
writing, 14(2), 122-131.

Phadtare, A., Bahmani, A., Shah, A., & Pietrobon, R. (2009). Scientific writing: a
randomized controlled trial comparing standard and on-line instruction. BMC medical
education, 9(1), 27.

Reynolds, J. A., Thaiss, C., Katkin, W., & Thompson, R. J. (2012). Writing-to-learn in
undergraduate science education: a community-based, conceptually driven approach.
CBE-Life Sciences Education, 11(1), 17-25.

Shah, J., Shah, A., & Pietrobon, R. (2009). Scientific writing of novice researchers: what
difficulties and encouragements do they encounter?. Academic Medicine, 84(4), 511-
516.