A. INTRODUCTION

My interest in the writing-in-the-disciplines movement grew out of my experience with students in the Science Program.  Although these students are required to produce lab reports on a regular basis, they do not tend to improve at writing discipline-specific prose as they progress from semester one to semester four.  This is especially disheartening given the considerable time and effort invested by teachers to read and provide feedback on written work.  There can be little doubt that students require better instruction in how to make and defend an argument.

 My WID portfolio follows on the heels of a previous WID fellow and colleague from the Physics Department, Jean-François Brière (see his portfolio here).  We team-teach an optional course to fourth-semester students, usually from the pure and applied science stream.  The primary objective of this course is to provide an introduction to computer programming with some applications to the natural sciences and engineering.  As the range of possible topics is vast, the course is well suited to a term project with an intensive writing component as its final evaluation.

 There is an unavoidable skill-and-drill component to this course: students must memorize the syntax and structures inherent to the java programming language.  In sharp contrast, the term project is entirely focused on the process of investigation and communication.  The intent is to mimic real scientific work and, with this in mind, we have decided to frame the term project as an undergraduate research conference complete with submission of a manuscript and a formal presentation.  Students, usually working in groups of two, are encouraged to present their work as an answer to a compelling question and are required:

• To make convincing arguments as to the validity of their approach.
• To respond to criticism and defend or refine their ideas in light of comments from peers.

Over time, the project has evolved to include three main components: a blog where students present their work-in-progress, a peer-review process whereby students provide feedback – both positive and negative – to other groups, and the final conference material (software, manuscript and presentation).

B. PROJECT DESIGN

 Research on the links between writing and deep learning suggests that effective assignments share three characteristics:  they include interactive components, they focus on a meaning-constructing task, and they provide clear explanations of writing expectations[1].  We have tried to incorporate all these elements in the design of the term project.

 The main idea behind so-called “interactive” components is to provide students with opportunities for feedback and a chance to refine or to rework their ideas without penalty.  As an example, class time is reserved early in the project for one-on-one meetings with teachers to brainstorm research ideas and to perform preliminary Internet searches of the available literature.  This kind of informal session is repeated twice as the project progresses and is the primary vehicle for direct feedback from teachers. 

 Feedback is also solicited from other groups through a formal peer-review process.  A blog is used as the medium for presenting short (usually less than 500 words) progress reports and as a forum for comment and criticism.  Groups are required to submit pieces on defined topics (e.g. the research question, an overview of the relevant theory, the numerical approach, etc.), which are critiqued by other members of the class.  In general, each group comments on the work of two other groups and responds to all criticisms they receive. 

 It is worth underlining that while students must respond to all comments, they do not have to agree.  This kind of activity is central to meaning-constructing tasks as it encourages active critical thinking by all parties.  Beyond the utility of interaction, introduction of a peer-review component exposes students to another facet of the research world and hopefully inspires the students to write with the perspective of the reader explicitly in mind. 

 As suggested by Bean[2], meaning-construction tasks can be made more effective by explicitly providing students with a RAFT (i.e., define the Role, Audience, Format, and Topic) and a TIP (i.e., Task as Intriguing Problem).  Although the format of the project covers all these points in a very natural way, the handout given to students emphasizes these elements <link to handout>.  In addition, the handout spells out our expectations and addresses some specific weaknesses that, over time, we have noticed in our students.  For example, students often have considerable difficulty framing their work as a research project and so we include concrete examples of “good” and “bad” research questions.  In our experience, explicit modeling like this helps to focus student work during brainstorming sessions.  Students also have little to no experience with providing criticism and we provide some hints as to how to go about critiquing the work of others.

 Of course, the evaluation rubric is also given as part of the handout.  One might expect evaluation to be tedious with so many groups completing so many small writing assignments.  To lighten the load, we have the students maintain a log and self-report their contributions to the group blog at the end of the semester.  While we were sure to keep an eye on developments on the blog, we did not see a need to read every entry or reply.