Communicating both written and oral arguments are among the most important skills necessary for undergraduates to succeed in industry and graduate school. Chemistry majors tend to practice and develop the vast majority of their writing through laboratory courses and lab components aligned with lecture courses. Unfortunately, we have found many students complete these courses with inadequate gains in writing skills leading to manuscripts that would be unacceptable for their future endeavors. Our central hypothesis is that students will make better gains in their writing skills through scalable and active learning writing cycles as a formal part of their laboratory course. We developed a programmatic and stepwise curriculum to improve technical writing skills through active learning and student-centered pedagogy in the Physical Chemistry laboratory course. Over the course of a semester, students go through a multi-step learning cycle, Commence-Act-Review-Reply-Revise (CAR3), where each cycle focuses on a very specific aspect of writing a technical journal-style article. Each cycle commences with students composing a rough draft on a specific section of a lab report. Students then attend a writing workshop that interactively engages them with guided inquiry-based activities focused on the specific writing aspects addressed within the submitted rough drafts. After each workshop, students complete peer reviews on the rough drafts. Finally, students complete a final draft of the report using the knowledge gained from the workshop and the peer-reviewer input. We gauged the effectiveness of our novel, scaffolded CAR3 cycle through pre/post writing efficacy along with comparisons to previous years where the writing cycle was not implemented. Each CAR3 cycle sequentially prepares students to construct a journal-style manuscript by the end of the semester.

Developing scientific writing abilities through scaled guided and active learning cycles in the physical chemistry laboratory

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.