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…

Students in the sciences learn to engage with primary research articles as a fundamental part of their discipline, essential to both writing and research. These sources are difficult to navigate, leading students to use (and misuse) these sources in a variety of complex ways. As instructors and researchers, we are aware of these challenges, but…

Purpose: This study aims to explore how youth poets wrote in a community of practice and how their out-of-school poetry writing contributed toward developing disciplinary literacy. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative case study, the authors studied youth's writing by drafting narrative field notes, collecting student writing and…

Research supports the finding that middle school students prefer hands-on activities to reading and writing to learn new information. However, disciplinary literacy, the reading and writing in science class, is an integral part of inquiry-based science instruction and a necessary complement to hands-on instruction to build student understanding.…

Written assignments are, perhaps, one of the most common types of coursework that students will encounter in their undergraduate studies. This study describes the communicative purpose and textual and linguistic characteristics of university assignments written for content classes, taking into account variation across communicative text types and…

National calls to improve science education include focusing on scientific practices coupled with learning disciplinary core ideas. Among the practices is constructing explanations. In the field of cellular and molecular biology, explanations typically include a mechanism and can be used to make predictions about phenomena. In this work, we…

Curriculum guidelines and professional organizations' recommendations lack details about how often and how much students should write in mathematics and what characteristics should define their writing. This study presents an analytic framework that addresses how often students are prompted in student mathematics books to write, how much they may…

A disciplinary literacy framework suggests that content-area teachers are best positioned to guide students into discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and communicating, such as teaching science students to write as scientists do. "Disciplinary literacy instruction" can move students beyond generic literacy strategies and prepare…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a case that can be used as a biochemistry learning resource in relation to the topic of viruses. Learning to use cases will be effective if students are assigned to produce reports, articles, or other scientific papers. Self-assessment can be used to assess the competencies that have been learnt…

The study used causal-comparative research design to examine the scientific literacy among randomly selected Junior High School students under the Science, Technology and Engineering Program (STEP) of a National High School in the Philippines. Specifically, it investigated the factors that facilitate and hinder the students' ability to write and…

Logical connectives are grammatical linkers that appear as essential components in the production of logical argumentation of inquiry and critical thinking in school science activities. However, these cohesive terms represent a language barrier for science student learning. Therefore, students' lack in their understanding of academic connectives…

Scientific writing and communication skills of undergraduate students in the Biology Education Program of University of Palangka Raya need to be improved. The purpose of this research was to implement mini-research in animal ecology field practice to train undergraduate students' scientific writing and communication skills. This descriptive…

After a grueling grading campaign, a chemist asked a writing and rhetoric specialist for help improving formal reports in the introductory organic chemistry lab. Together, we realized that the very best student reports employ many persuasive moves in the combined results and discussion subsection, whereas weaker papers omit the persuasive…

The dissertation is composed of two main parts. The first half describes efforts to study amyloid peptides using macrocyclic peptide model systems, and the potential deleterious effects of uronium peptide coupling agents on human health. The second half focuses on my experience in chemistry teaching and the chemical education research I conducted.…

Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because (1) their academic expertise is often not writing and (2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of…