Teaching Students to Write Scientific Articles and Lab Reports
The importance of being able to understand and explain in clear language the meaning of fundamental scientific concepts is central to science literacy. One study examining factors that influenced student success in scientific writing found that the only accurate predictor was prior scientific writing experience.
Students need practice, and it is up to science instructors to require students to write in their classes and to seek the best ways to teach them to write effectively.
Other studies have demonstrated that an explicit focus on building students’ scientific writing abilities also improves students’ critical thinking skills, their ability to read and understand scientific literature, and their overall success in the biology curriculum. Thus, for multiple reasons, there is a real need for practical tools to facilitate scientific writing instruction.
Click here to download the lab report rubric and template
Students make the most progress in their writing when assignments are broken into small chunks. When discussing any research study, it is essential to understand the purpose, the process, and the findings.
A successful ‘Results’ section weaves together all three of these aspects, so it is a good place to start. Have students work in pairs or small groups and read the ‘Results’ paragraph of a published article. They will then answer the following five questions:
1) WHY? was the experiment performed. What question was it trying to answer?
2) HOW? was the question approached; what was actually done? Summarizing the procedure helps students make connections between their experimental question and the data. The details of the procedure should be sufficient to interpret the data, but not as detailed as in the Materials and Methods section.
3)WHERE? In which table or figure are the data shown? For example, “As shown in Table 2…” or at the end of a sentence (Figure3).
4) WHAT? A full description of the actual results of the experiment is next. This is not a list of all the data, but it should describe overall trends over time and differences between samples at each time point.
5) So? This is a discussion; based on the results, what is the answer to the original question? In scientific writing, it’s important to connect the WHAT? (what you observed in the experiment) to the SO?, ie. the original question the experiment was trying to answer. From there, the conclusion could go on to compare the data from this study to other published data from similar studies, and then to a proposal for further follow-up experiments or a suggestion of the broader implications of the results.
Once students have thoroughly dissected the article, assess them by having each student write a ‘Results’ section for an experiment they have performed in class. You can click here to download the Mealworm Lab! Once they master ‘Results’, other sections can be introduced in similar fashion.
References:
1.Jerde CL, Taper ML. 2004. Preparing undergraduates for professional writing: evidence supporting the benefits of scientific writing within the biology curriculum. J Coll Sci Teach. 33:33-36.
2. Libarkin J, Ording G. 2012. The utility of writing assignments in undergraduate bioscience. CBE Life Sci Educ. 11:39-46.
3. Quitadamo IJ, Kurtz MJ. 2007. Learning to improve: using writing to increase critical thinking performance in general biology education. CBE Life Sci Educ. 6:140-154.
4.Brownell SE, Price JV, Steinman L. 2013. A writing-intensive course improves biology undergraduates’ perception and confidence of their abilities to read scientific literature and communicate science. Adv Physiol Educ. 37:70-79.
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