Improving Scientific Writing In Undergraduate STEM Classrooms: A Training Program for Students and Teaching Assistants Aided By Information Extraction Technology

Wake Forest University, Winston Salem NC

Investigators

Abstract

Scientific thinking and communication skills are vital for 21st century STEM careers. Research indicates that cycles of writing drafts, receiving actionable feedback and coaching, then making further refinements until a final product emerges is the most effective way for students to develop these skills. Ideally, students should be writing and revising routinely, but this may be time- and labor-intensive to be practical in high-enrollment STEM courses. Also, college teachers may not know how best to make high-impact writing instruction part of their classes. This project uses a research-based curriculum designed to develop scientific reasoning skills through writing, combining text analysis technology with an integrated writing training program. The project will test whether students' writing skills development can be accelerated by combining reading and text annotation exercises, automated feedback using text analysis technology, and holistic feedback from instructors. Graduate teaching assistants' mastery of these training methods will also be examined. Finally, the project will look directly at technology impacts by measuring how much automated feedback students use, and how that translates into progress towards writing mastery. The project's goal is to improve scientific writing skills of undergraduate students by promoting adoption of evidence-based writing training. The project has three interacting elements. 1) STEM Automated Writing Help Tool (SAWHET) is a computer-based tool designed to teach undergraduates scientific writing according to best practice principles. SAWHET collects texts of draft student lab reports, conducts text analysis, then gives students tailored feedback. 2) The Biology Thesis Assessment Protocol (BioTAP) is a protocol for assessing undergraduate STEM research theses. BioTAP will be used to teach students to score published papers and training reports before writing their first report. 3) Graduate teaching assistants will be trained to teach and assess scientific writing more consistently. The central research question will be addressed: Can an integrated writing training program combining these three elements accelerate student writing skills development? Assessments will include standardized student and teaching assistant knowledge, self-efficacy, and experience surveys; videotape analysis of classroom instruction; lexical complexity modeling of student writing; qualitative analysis of instructor comments on reports, and student lab evaluations. This project will provide much-needed data on how technology support affects development of scientific writing skills. Project products will include a repository of approximately 4,000 annotated biology student lab reports that can be used as training data for linguistic analyses, to test other automated systems, and other research.