Our organic chemistry course enrolls students from the medicine major. As future healthcare professionals, medical students should also take on the responsibility of publicizing scientific knowledge related to human health. Therefore, starting from 2020, we have designed an assignment that tasked students with writing a popular science essay for…

For 12 years, Denise Gillman has taught the course Science on the Stage at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. The plays studied awaken intellectual curiosity and understanding of human nature and complex scientific ideas within the framework of a good story and can do so for students of every major. This article presents how…

Faculty from the chemistry and English departments have developed a combined second-semester honors general chemistry and college writing course that fosters critical thinking through challenging writing assignments. Examples of case-study writing assignments and guidelines are provided that faculty at other institutions can adapt in similar…

Most scientists agree that comprehension of primary scientific papers and communication of scientific concepts are two of the most important skills that we can teach, but few undergraduate biology courses make these explicit course goals. We designed an undergraduate neuroimmunology course that uses a writing-intensive format. Using a mixture of…

This paper presents a set of activities, which scaffolds students to succeed in the standard Physics gateway course. The set of instructional activities that were designed included four distinct components: reflective writing, collaborative groups, critiques, and an essay question on the examination. Each activity was designed to lead into and…

This paper explores Malaysian students' problems within their science and engineering tertiary courses in Japanese through their diary entries and semi-structured interviews. The study analyses how students implement management strategies to overcome their problems. Although many studies are available regarding students' academic activities in a…

In 2006-2007, we established a writing exercise in two large first-year biology courses. Overall, our exercise, which consisted of multiple drafts of a 500-word essay, offered students a good introduction to how editorial feedback can improve content and style in scientific writing. We discuss our goals, procedures, outcome, and students'…