LabWrite: A National Web-Based Initiative to Use the Lab Report to Improve the Way Students Write, Visualize, and Understand Science

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of student and faculty hours are devoted annually in the U.S. to the undergraduate science lab report, an exercise reflecting and perpetuating many of the shortcomings in science education identified in such reports as the NRC's 1999 Transforming Undergraduate Education in SMET. With comparatively small development and dissemination costs, our project team (from science communication, scientific visualization, botany, chemistry, and physics) is attempting to harness this ubiquitous activity to improve the way students write, visualize, and understand science. Our first goal is to revise and disseminate for national use our online prototype, developed, piloted, and assessed through our one-year NSF-CCLI grant in 2000-01. LabWrite, a series of instructional and faculty development modules, encourages and enhances use of the lab report so that students and instructors can take advantage of the opportunities it offers to develop and expand students' scientific literacy. Our second goal is to build an instructional infrastructure for improving the teaching and learning experience of the laboratory nationwide. Materials and faculty workshops are being piloted within physics, chemistry, and biology courses at NC State and at a small liberal arts women's college, a historically black university, a community college, and a large, comprehensive university. Once fully tested and revised, we anticipate publishing LabWrite as a supplement to science textbooks as well as a comprehensive interactive package for a variety of lab classes.