Building a Student Community to Improve Student Writing Skills
Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2016, Volume 37
Dawn Carter & Corey Ptak
Abstract
First year college students find scientific writing difficult. They often take a first year writing class, but the
style and content required in laboratory reports is new to them. In addition, scientific disciplines approach
student writing differently, and there is often no systematic approach to teaching science writing across the
curriculum, and no expectations for progress from year to year. As scientists, we communicate by reading
and writing papers. Reading papers is daunting for first year students, and writing like a scientist is even
harder. At first, students find reading papers very difficult. The language is strange, they don't understand
the jargon; papers are long and quite difficult to follow. They wonder how they will ever belong to the
group that actually writes these documents! Introducing students to scientific literature early and using
suitable examples helps them to model and improve their writing.
Keywords: student writing skills
Boston University (2015)
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