STUDENT WRITING
Writing in Technical Fields

By Tasha Teutsch Hausmann

This section has two objectives: to introduce GSIs to scaffolding as a teaching tool for science courses, and to give GSIs an opportunity to practice designing assignments that help students understand the anatomy of scientific papers and lab reports. Assigning student writing involves three basic stages: (1) designing an assignment, (2) articulating its parameters, and (3) determining an evaluation strategy.

Scaffolding the assignment

Scaffolding, among other things, means breaking the writing process down into smaller, manageable pieces (a sample appears at the end of this section.)

• Writing is a daunting task for many students. Help relieve some of their anxiety by breaking down a large assignment into smaller parts.
• Help students understand that writing is a difficult process, even for the most seasoned academics.
• Build in class time to do peer reviews so that students learn to edit their own work and the work of others. You can not expect to write things perfectly on the first try!

If your course allows you the freedom, plan for students to carry a research project throughout the semester. You can help break down the process by asking them to turn in a series of smaller assignments:

1. At the beginning of the semester, ask students to propose a research question or topic
   
   
2. Have students clarify this question and provide an annotated bibliography to demonstrate that they are familiar with the literature on the topic. This would be a good time to ask students to have well-developed, testable hypotheses
   
   
3. Ask students to write a research proposal with a developed introduction and a description of the methods they plan to employ. In the proposal, they should focus on providing a context and rationale for their research.
   
   
4. If time permits, allow students to carry out their research and analyze their data. You may ask them to turn in tables, figures and graphs with legends. This will allow you to converse with students about effective ways to communicate quantitative information. It will also provide the framework for the results and discussion sections.
   
   
5. As a grand finale, have students write up their results in a formal report using the format that is most common in your discipline. They should have most of the paper already written by this point since they have already developed majority of the information for the introduction and methods in their proposals.