Technical writing is a crucial skill for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals. To help develop and improve that skill, faculty in the Arkansas State University Department of Biological Sciences will collaborate with colleagues in the Department of English to design two STEM technical writing courses. The first one will be for undergraduate Biology majors. The second one will be for STEM and English graduate students. The undergraduate writing course will be required of all students concurrent with Biology of the Cell Laboratory (BoCL). This is a lab class already required of all Biology majors. It is usually taken in the sophomore year. Graduate students who have successfully completed the graduate level course will receive further training in teaching. Each graduate student will be to work one-on-one with BoCL students. This project is an extension of a successful two-year pilot study pairing a technical writing course with Genetics Laboratory. Based on this pilot, the project team expects that BoCL students will improve their technical writing skills, their critical thinking ability, and their ease in reading and interpreting the scientific literature. Further, the project team expects that university STEM and English graduate students will attain communication and teaching skills crucial to their future careers. If successful, this program may serve as a model to increase all students' capabilities and progress in STEM. It has the potential to generalize to other institutions to enhance STEM education nationwide.
As is true at many universities, Arkansas State University undergraduate STEM students' formal writing training has consisted of English Composition. This course crosses many genres but does not adequately prepare STEM students for the technical writing they face in their courses and research. Thus, these students commonly enter graduate school lacking the science communication skills required for their future research careers. Additionally, STEM faculty avoid including writing assignments in and out of the classroom, often because of faculty time constraints and the instructors' lack of formal training in writing instruction. This grant will develop two STEM Technical Writing courses. One will be for undergraduate Biology majors (BoCL). The other will be for STEM and English graduate students (STW). These writing courses will be analyzed with respect to changes in the way educators work with students, particularly in writing. They will also be analyzed to determine whether writing and reading are concurrently improved through this cooperative effort. Additionally, this project will assess critical thinking. This project activity is based on the hypothesis that writing instruction can serve as a vehicle for increasing student understanding and thinking. To evaluate the success of this effort, students in both classes students will be assessed both pre- and post-semester. The assessment will evaluate the students' confidence in writing, knowledge of technical writing, and writing practices. The Critical Thinking Assessment Test will be used to assess student critical thinking. There are few existing, strong evaluation tools for STEM reading. Therefore, a test of critical reading will be developed and validated by project staff. It will be used to assess increases in critical reading in STW/BoCL students. This project could serve as a model for other institutions to enhance STEM education and communication nationwide.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
