Writing Across the Curriculum: Best Practices, Implementation, and Application to General Chemistry I and II Labs Through Higher-Level Special Topics

Introduction

In the Summer of 2021, a cohort of faculty from many different schools, colleges, and disciplines at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) were selected from amongst many highly-qualified applicants to form a group of faculty members to learn about the use of writing to enhance student learning and engagement in various fields. The group formed the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Faculty Learning Community (FLC) 2021. Through the support of the Provost's Office, Dean of Faculty, and the Teaching and Learning Center at FAMU, faculty facilitators from the department of English and the FAMU Writing Center guided faculty from this group in understanding strategies, approaches, and best practices to applying writing into their curriculum. This chapter will provide insight into this author's experience during Summer 2021 Writing Across the Curriculum Faculty Learning Community. This work is a qualitative conceptual presentation of ideas planned for use in several labs. However, it is important to note that it has only been introduced in one lab course (Short Courses for Chemistry majors) out of all the various laboratory courses within the Chemistry Department at Florida A&M University. Early on, faculty members from the learning community were briefed through examples and exercises by the workshop's facilitators on the proper construction and use of student learning outcomes and the application of writing activities and concepts used in professional writing practices. The organization of such groups was the recognition that writing plays an integral role in learning, cognitive development, and critical thinking. The group focused on introducing writing across the different curricula curriculums using the book Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. (Bean, 2011) Shahu (2022) et. al. state, “The practice of writing a scientific report is useful and pedagogical if taught as part of the learning process because it strengthens skills important for chemists, including logical organization, attention to detail, writing, communication, and critical thinking (Shahu, 2022)." This supports that writing has profound impact on student learning and gaining of critical thinking skills. In a work found on the American Society for Engineering Education's website, not only are enhanced critical thinking skills listed as a benefit to introducing writing in the laboratory, but also professional communication skills building is listed as an added benefit to students writing in the laboratory (Rhudy, 2019). Also cited in that work was an article by Codon (2004) et al. that explains the strong correlation between writing and critical thinking skills (Condon, 2004). Besides critical thinking and professional communication skills, introducing writing into laboratories has other benefits; for example, another work stated that shortened writing assignments would force students to think carefully about their words and effectively improve their learning within a STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) course (Troy, 2016, June). The work presented here will show how student writing assignments can go beyond just writing a scientific laboratory report in our traditional labs but also by implementing the practice in other assessment areas, for example, pre and post-laboratory quizzes. In the writing to learn approach (Reynolds, 2012), not only do the students learn about improving their writing skills, the writing works to improve their ability to learn and articulate what they have learned in science. Moskovitz (2011) et al., wrote on writing to learn applied to science laboratories. Moskovitz’s findings directly correlate to the application discussed here regarding lab assignments and quizzes involving writing (Moskovitz, 2011). There is tremendous evidence that writing can enhance learning in multiple areas of science and health education, particularly Nursing, where adding writing to the curriculum was explored and found to be of significant benefit to the Nursing students (Poirrier, 1997). Moskovitz (2011) cited several works that reported lectures are not necessarily the best modes of learning science. Many of these references promoted active learning activities instead (Black, 1993; Bodner, 1992; Brooks, Alternatives to traditional lecturing, 1984; Brooks, 1993; Crosby, 1992; Dinan & Frydrychowski, 1995; Gillespie, 1991; Heady, 1993; Spencer, 1993). Increased writing assignments by students were also found to enhance learning in Pharmacy (Ranelli, 1998), physical chemistry (Reilly, 2010), physiology (Poronnik P, 2006), and other areas (Poirrier, 1997). Writing to learn was also supported by the work of Poock et al. in the General Chemistry laboratories, much like the proposed work (Poock, 2007). In this work, students were presented with inquiry-based questions to complete the labs rather than writing traditional lab reports. Students' performance was then measured in the lecture course and found to have made significant gains compared to students with just traditional lectures. Poock et al. also noted that students learned more using active learning approaches. The inquiry-based lab serves as an active learning experience in concert with the lab in their study, as would be the case in the work proposed here. This author proposes to do something similar in that the quizzes and pre and post-lab questions be made inquiry-based if needed or to follow the current content except formatted as written responses which will be highlighted shortly in this chapter.