Increased specialisation of disciplinary cultures creates barriers for students who may not understand the genre, style and conventions of disciplinary writing. Academic literacies research recognises that literacy is a social practice where writing is inextricably linked to knowledge construction. Learning to write, therefore, requires…

Analysis of weekly peer-reviewed writing exercises in undergraduate introductory biology courses revealed that student improvement in ability to judge essays correlated with improvement in their own writing (n = 121 students). This correlation occurred across the spectrum of academic ability. The essays were scored by peers, self, and the…

Teaching engineering students how to effectively communicate using the language, representations, and tools specific to their discipline is important to their development as practitioners in their respective fields. This article describes a literature review of learning activities intended to teach crystal structure and crystallography and…

Despite growing theoretical and empirical evidence that writing has the potential to be an effective tool for student learning in undergraduate mathematics, writing-to-learn integration in mathematics is rare. Major deterrents include perceived lack of alignment between writing and learning goals, deficit views of students' writing abilities, and…

This paper conceptualises and explores 'the art of critique' in student writing in the humanities and social sciences [Foucault 1997. "What is Critique?" In: "The Politics of Truth." English Translation. Translated from French by Lysa Hocroth & Catherine Porter. In "Dits et Ecrits" for original French. Los…

Although effective technical communication is an important outcome of undergraduate education in STEM fields, limited process-based writing instruction occurs in these disciplines. This study employed an experimental design to examine the use of Calibrated Peer Review (CPR), an online peer review platform, to improve lab report writing in an…

The study described in this article was designed to assess students' faith integration (FI) learning in a mathematics writing course and its impact on service-learning (SL) as well as to understand how SL can be used to help students think in new ways about the integration of mathematics and faith. A Scholarship of Teaching and Learning…

This study reports on how a cohort of 16 especially accomplished undergraduate STEM majors narrate their literacy histories, experience learning to write in the sciences during their college years, and reflect on their priorities for writing more generally. These participants report largely positive early schooling experiences with writing;…

The title of an article is the first chance at catching a reader's attention. We set to develop a list of title attributes that lead to attractive titles in psychology papers, which could then be used to help instruct undergraduate students on how to write good titles for their papers and projects. Currently, research into successful elements that…

Incorporating writing into an economics course is a beneficial goal of economic educators. The potential benefits of using writing to enhance learning among economics students have been emphasized in the literature. Writing to Learn (WTL) is an act of using writing activities to help students think through key concepts presented in a course. The…

The Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine(UCI), instituted an upper-division "Writing for Chemists" course in fall 2017 that fulfills part of UCI's writing graduation requirement. During the 2019-2020 school year, the course was redesigned using a specifications grading system with the following goals: (1) to…

This paper deals with writing a proof text as the final step of the proving process at university level, particularly when it results in a disorganized, unclear draft. The reported study concerns third year university students when dealing with proof tasks for which the proving process has to be built up, as opposed to tasks that students may…

A common learning goal of law-related courses taught in sociology classrooms is for students to gain an understanding of the sociological approach to law. This approach emphasizes viewing law as a social process and studying law by analyzing both legal and nonlegal phenomena. A challenge to students' achievement of this learning goal is their…

The communication of scientific findings through writing is an important skill for undergraduate science majors to develop as they move through their respective degree programs. Seeing the importance of science communication skill development, we brought a science communication blog written by graduate students on the same campus to the attention…

This research study of a WAC learning community focuses on instructors' behind-the-scenes decision making about assignment design. Specifically, we show how instructors use direct personal experience--as students, teachers and scholars--to approach writing assignment design, invoking these experiences to discuss the origin of their assignments and…