The teacher writing toolkit: enhancing undergraduate teaching of scientific writing in the biological sciences

ABSTRACT

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both teachers and students. This article offers and reviews several useful ‘toolkit’ items that instructors of science writing can use to improve college student success. The tools in this kit are both conceptual and practical, and include: 1) Understanding the role of student metacognition, cognitive instruction, and strategic teaching, 2) Recognition of different student writing levels, 3) Applying the writing process, 4) Demonstrational classroom revision and editing, 5) Student-teacher sentence editing, 6) Student peer editing and guided student editing, 7) Student copy-editing, 8) Reflective writing, 9) Addressing plagiarism, paraphrasing, and proper in-text citations and referencing, and 10) Using external, on campus and online resources. Additionally, we discuss the new challenges of teaching scientific writing online versus face-to-face. The discussions, approaches, and exercises presented in this paper empower teachers in assisting students in their development of a personal writing style, while simultaneously building student confidence. The tools we present augment our previous presentation of the student writing toolkit, and can improve and enhance the teaching of scientific writing to undergraduate students.

KEYWORDS:

• Biological writing
• undergraduates
• teaching approaches
• class instruction
• scientific writing

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

We continually appreciated our students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley for the wealth of examples they provide, which help us teach biological communications and technical writing. Also, we would like to thank several anonymous reviewers who helped improve the manuscript with their edits.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected/amended. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2018.1510605).