Article pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Argument-Driven Inquiry: Using the Laboratory To Improve Undergraduates’ Science Writing Skills through Meaningful Science Writing, Peer-Review, and Revision Joi Phelps Walker*,1 and Victor Sampson2 1 2
Science and Mathematics Division, Tallahassee Community College, Tallahassee, Florida 32304, United States School of Teacher Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32314, United States S Supporting Information *
ABSTRACT: This paper presents preliminary evidence supporting the use of peer review in undergraduate science as a means to improve student writing and to alleviate barriers, such as lost class time, by incorporation of the peerreview process into the laboratory component of the course. The study was conducted in a single section of an undergraduate general chemistry laboratory course offered at a large two-year community college located in the southeastern United States. The chemistry laboratory course was taught using Argument-Driven Inquiry, an instructional model that incorporates double-blind group peer review of student laboratory reports, and allows students to revise their reports based on the peer reviews. The reports written for each laboratory activity were used to examine changes in the students’ writing skills over time and to identify aspects of science writing that were the most difficult for the undergraduates in this context. The reviews generated by the students were used to evaluate student engagement in the peer-review process. The results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reports and reviews indicate that the participants made significant improvements in the their ability to write in science and were able to evaluate the quality of their peers’ writing with a relatively high degree of accuracy, but also struggled with several aspects of science writing. KEYWORDS: First-Year Undergraduate/General, Chemical Education Research, Laboratory Instruction, Communication/Writing FEATURE: Chemical Education Research
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INTRODUCTION Undergraduate students in lower-division lab courses have few opportunities to write reports that describe the context, process, and outcome of an inquiry-based investigation. Current research also indicates that undergraduate students have few opportunities to conduct a formal review of other students’ reports as part of their coursework.1,2 It should therefore not be surprising to anyone that many students struggle to write in a scientific manner.3−5 To address this problem, students need opportunities not only to practice meaningful science writing, but also to engage in peer review and revision. Research indicates that peer review is both a valid mechanism for evaluation and a valuable experience for students.6 We have therefore developed an approach to lab instruction called Argument-Driven Inquiry (or ADI) that incorporates these key writing experiences into each lab activity without sacrificing course content or the development of inquiry abilities.7,8 In the sections that follow, we will first provide an overview of the various stages of the approach. We will then provide some empirical support for it by sharing some findings from an exploratory study that we conducted to examine how students responded to the peer-review and revision process. Finally, we will conclude the article with our © XXXX American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
recommendations for course instructors interested in using this approach.
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OVERVIEW OF THE ADI INSTRUCTIONAL MODEL The ADI instructional model consists of seven steps (see Figure 1). An ADI lab investigation begins with the course instructor providing a research question for students to answer. Groups of three or four students are then expected to develop a method that they can use to gather the data needed to answer the question. Once the groups have collected their data, they are directed to develop a tentative argument (a claim that answers the research questions supported by evidence and rationale) on a 60 × 90 cm2 whiteboard. The students are then given an opportunity to share and critique the merits of the various arguments and refine their own conclusions during an argumentation session. Students are then required to write an investigation report on their own as homework. The report is organized into three sections around three fundamental questions: 1. What were you trying to do and why?
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed300656p | J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
Journal of Chemical Education
Article
“good” for each criterion on the peer-review guide. Groups are also directed to provide explicit feedback to the author about what needs to be done in order to improve the quality of the report and the writing as part of their review. Overall, the intent of this step is to provide the students with the explicit and detailed feedback they need in order to improve, an opportunity to learn and adopt new criteria for evaluating science writing, and an opportunity to read the writing of others so they can see examples of better ways of presenting information in text. This step is intended to provide an opportunity for students to learn from their mistakes without imposing a grade-related penalty. The final step of the ADI instructional model is to revise the report based on the results of the peer review. Authors who wrote papers that were not accepted by their peers are required to rewrite their reports based on the reviewers’ comments and suggestions. The reports that are accepted by the reviewers may be submitted to the instructor at the end of this step (but all students are given the option to revise their report). Once completed, the revised reports (along with the original version of the report and the peer-review sheet) are submitted to the instructor for a final grade. The last three stages of ADI are incorporated into the model to give students an opportunity to develop their science writing skills. The explicit focus on writing in science in this model is not a unique feature. In fact, many science educators teach science writing as part of a lab course or have even created stand-alone writing courses for science majors.9−11 Many of these courses, however, are designed to teach science writing skills separate from the content and in a decontextualized manner (see Brillhart and Debs,9 Flynn, McCulley, and Gratz,10 and Powell,11 as examples). ADI differs from these approaches because it was designed, in part, to teach content and science writing at the same time by requiring students to complete realistic writing tasks and engage in serious writing practices as part of each lab investigation. As a result, ADI can be described as a “writing to learn by learning to write” approach to teaching science writing skills.12,13
Figure 1. The seven steps of the ADI instructional model. Adapted from “Argument-Driven Inquiry: An Introduction to a New Instructional Model for Use in Undergraduate Chemistry Labs”, by J. P. Walker, V. Sampson, and C. O. Zimmerman.8.
2. What did you do and why? 3. What is your argument? To help students learn how to communicate information in multiple modes, they are also encouraged to organize the data they gathered during the second step of the model into tables or graphs that they embed into the report and then reference in the body of the text. The three questions the students address as they write target the same information that is included in more traditional laboratory report formats (e.g., introduction, procedure, results, and discussion), but the questions are designed to help students understand the importance of argument in science, to elicit their awareness of the audience, and to help the make sense of the content (e.g., what they know, how they know, and why they believe it) as they write. Overall, the intent of this format is to bring the persuasive aspects of science writing to the foreground and to highlight the nonnarrative and multimodal (e.g., words, figures, tables) nature of scientific texts. The students are required to submit four typed copies with only an identification number to the instructor at the beginning of the next session. The instructor then randomly distributes three or four sets of reports (i.e., the reports written by three or four different students) to each lab group along with a peerreview guide for each set of reports. The peer-review guide includes specific criteria to be used to evaluate the quality of an investigation report and space to provide feedback to the author. (For further details, see ref 8.) The lab groups review each report as a team and then decide whether it can be accepted as-is or whether it needs to be revised based on the criteria provided on the peer-review sheet. Students are required to make these decisions as a group because it gives them an opportunity to negotiate “what counts” as quality with each other and prevents students from simply checking off
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CAN ADI HELP STUDENTS WRITE BETTER IN SCIENCE? INITIAL FINDINGS FROM AN EXPLORATORY STUDY We conducted a small study in a single section of a general chemistry lab course offered at a community college to examine the potential of ADI as a way to help undergraduates learn how to write in science as part of a pilot project.14 The students in this course completed six ADI investigations and wrote five different reports (four of which were peer reviewed). A quantitative analysis of the initial and final draft of the reports and peer-review guides collected during the original study indicated that the reports written by the students improved significantly as a result of the peer-review process and the students’ overall scores on both the initial and final version of the reports improved over the course of a semester (see ref 14). That analysis demonstrates how undergraduates’ science writing skills can improve over the course of a semester when a course instructor uses the ADI instructional model, and provides some evidence that undergraduates can, when they review a report as a group and use a guide, provide an accurate evaluation of their peers’ writing. In this article, we share the results of a secondary analysis of the data we collected during the original study in order to compare the gains made by the stronger and weaker writers in the course. We also examined B
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed300656p | J. Chem. Educ. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
Journal of Chemical Education
Article
Table 1. General Description of the ADI Investigations Used in the Study ADI Investigation 1 2 3 4
Concept
Guiding Question
Physical Properties Molecular Formulas Solutions
Are the samples provided made of the same material? What is the identity of the unknown hydrate? How could you prepare more of this dye? What is the optimum mole ratio for a chemical reaction? How could you isolate 0.5 g of product?
Limiting Reagents Chemical Reactions
6
Nature of Inquiry Activity Given three objects, students determine density using multiple methods for determining volume. Given an unknown hydrate, students evaporate water to determine the percent water and identify the hydrate. Given a solution prepared with a combination of food dyes, students use spectroscopy to identify the solutes and generate calibration curves to determine the solute concentration. By collecting the carbon dioxide gas generated with different mole ratios of sodium bicarbonate and acetic acid, students identify the optimum mole ratio for the reaction. Given two types of reactions (redox and precipitation), the students prepare two types of product then compare yields of product and issues associated with each reaction and product recovery.
Table 2. Overall Scores for Strong and Weak Writers for the Initial and Final Version of Each Report Scores for Strong Writers (N = 8) Reports 1: 1: 2: 2: 3: 3: 4: 4: 6: a
Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final Initial
Scores for Weak Writers (N = 8)
Median
Mean
SD
Median
Mean
SD
z Values
p Values
20.00 23.00 19.00 22.00 21.00 24.00 22.00 25.00 25.00
19.89 23.67 19.11 22.89 21.11 23.78 21.78 24.78 26.11
1.90 2.18 1.83 2.32 2.03 1.64 1.64 2.22 3.02
15.00 20.00 18.00 20.00 19.00 22.00 22.00 25.00 23.00
13.00 20.11 16.89 21.00 17.78 21.89 20.22 23.89 24.44
3.28 3.41 2.85 2.87 4.15 3.48 3.23 3.72 4.04
−3.59 −2.41 −1.84 −1.43 −2.29 −1.16 −0.72 −0.22 −1.19
3.00) were (i) an opportunity to revise their reports (M = 3.29) and (ii) the chance to read good examples of reports (M = 3.07). The three aspects of the course that the students’ perceived as being the least helpful (mean rating
