An undergraduate level course dedicated to scientific writing and communication is extremely useful for all science majors, as it can provide a tangible link between their gained fundamental knowledge and becoming a peer in the scientific community. Such courses do not often include a laboratory component. However, in my ideal pedagogical approach to a scientific writing course, students would collect empirical data and compose a research manuscript as a term paper. I have overcome the lack of a laboratory component in such a course by asking students to develop their own experiments and collect their own data from their personal laboratory � their kitchens. Motivating students to use food preparation as a chemical experiment does more than just provide them with adequate data for their term papers. Students develop a new awareness for chemical and physical variables, acquire experimental planning and development expertise, and most seem to gain an enhanced set of independent thinking skills. The assignment requires students to treat every ingredient in the meal as a chemical and each piece of kitchen equipment as scientific instrumentation. Students are required to provide correctly formatted scientific terms for consumables and equipment; they are also encouraged to bring their experimental results into the classroom for statistical taste-test data. Each work culminates with the submission of a communication-type manuscript properly formatted by using the Journal of the American Chemical Society's Communication Template. The details of this assignment are presented along with resulting sample term papers from students over the past two years.

Your kitchen is the laboratory: A useful method for a research-based term paper
assignment in a scientific writing lecture course

239th National Meeting (2010)

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Your kitchen is the laboratory: A useful method for a research-based term paper assignment in a scientific writing lecture course