External reviews of Departmental curricula are often required by accrediting agencies, including the American Chemical Society.  One of our assessment goals of Chemistry Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston is to monitor the development of scientific writing throughout the curriculum.  However, we have been unable to find a standard assessment tool available that aligns well with our writing assessment goals.  To meet this need we have designed our own writing assessment rubric. From this, we hope to observe what skills our students enter with, what skills they struggle with, and what skills we teach effectively over the course of our curriculum. A rubric was created with five facets: Scientific Inquiry (a question is asked and answered); Data Presentation and Analysis; Components (contains the necessary sections of a lab report); Style and Mechanics (written with proper English grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc.); and Audience (written as a Chemistry paper). For each question in each facet, answers were described with numerical values ranging from 0 to 4, representing Benchmark not met (0); Benchmark met for first year student (1); Benchmark met for second year student (2); Emerging proficiency for intermediate level (3); and B.S. Level mastery, prepared for graduate work (4). The pilot iteration of the rubric was used by two readers to score a sample of lab reports from courses from each of the four years of the major. This led to refinement and changes to the rubric, and the resulting first-generation rubric was used to rate student papers submitted to a designated lab course for each semester of the major. Further adjustments led to a second-generation rubric, which is currently in use. Results using both rubrics show both predictable and surprising results. Overall, scores trended higher as students advanced through major, as would be expected. Student papers from the first semester of senior year scored on average somewhere between intermediate mastery (3) and B.S. level work (4). However, scores for organic chemistry labs were anomalously low; this is almost certainly an issue with the curriculum itself, as the lab reports for those courses generally do not expect analysis and interpretation of data, which is a significant component of the rubric. Another surprising result is that the scores for the Audience facet, reflecting our students’ understanding of the appropriate voices and verb tenses for SW, were much higher than expected.

Development of a rubric to assess scientific writing in the chemistry curriculum

256th National Meeting (2018)

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