Scaffolded and Incremental Lab Report Writing Guidelines – A Pedagogical Model Used in 3rd Year Human Biology Laboratory Courses

 

Alistair V. Dias

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2016, Volume 37

Abstract

Students often enter upper year laboratory courses with limited scientific writing skills. Troubling issues include confusion about what to include in each section of a report (abstract, introduction, methods, discussion/conclusions), how to properly report observations using well formatted figures or tables, and a lack of knowledge on how to properly support data with the scientific literature. Over the last several years, all the core 3rd year laboratory courses in the Human Biology Program (HBP)at the University of Toronto have been structured to try and address these issues by using an incremental and scaffolded lab report writing strategy

Keywords:  writing, writing assignments, science writing, scaffolding, student writing skills

Boston University (2015)