LabWrite: Instructional Modules Utilizing the Lab Report to Help Students Write and Visualize Science

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An interdisciplinary faculty team from the University is leading a 12-month planning effort to lay the basis for developing four commercially publishable instructional modules that better utilize the lab report to prepare undergraduates in the practice of scientific thinking and communication, both verbal and visual. In different combinations of hard copy, web-based, and/or CD-ROM format, each module is aimed at a specific population concerned with the lab report assignment: undergraduates (including pre-service teachers), graduate teaching assistants, faculty, and their respective institutional centers for teaching and learning. During this 1-year effort, the PIs are engaged in: (1) characterizing the precise national need for these materials in order to refine the approach most suitable to meet those needs; (2) creating, piloting, revising, and field-testing a prototype of LabWrite for Teaching Assistants; (3) building relationships with potential commercial publishers; and (4) seeking further funding for full-scale development. Most of the content for this module will be developed during the Summer 1999, piloted in introductory Chemistry sections and transformed into web-based prototypes during the Fall 1999, and field-tested in this web-based format in introductory Chemistry, Engineering, Geology, and Zoology sections in Spring 2000. PIs include three nationally recognized researchers in the rhetoric of science and technology and writing across the curriculum as well as a graphics communication researcher from the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education. The project team will work with an advisory committee of science, engineering, and design faculty from the University and with two distinguished faculty from MIT (Leslie Perelman) and University of Michigan Leslie Olsen who are leading efforts (one NSF-funded) at their own institutions to reform instruction in scientific and technical communication. The LabWrite Series is being designed to reach all majors in lab-based science and engineering courses, including pre-service teachers and graduate teaching assistants preparing to become faculty. Much of their content of LabWrite is intended to be designed for web- and CD-ROM-based delivery.