Technical Writing & Productive Confusion
Overview
This lesson was designed to create confusion in the classroom by providing lab protocols with missing information. Students had been struggling to communicate effectively in their scientific writing, and this lesson created a palpable classroom experience where students quickly learned the importance of concise and precise technical writing and communication.
Problem
In the lab courses that I designed at Boston College, students were required to write lab reports in the style of a technical publication, however students were not prepared to write 5-7 page reports in the sciences. They did not realize that communicating about experiments is just as important as doing them. Before I joined the curriculum team, the students were expected to learn this skill by looking at sample lab reports and ingesting the grading rubric. Despite these supports, students were still struggling.
My Role
As the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Labs, it was my responsibility to check in on the progress of the students and to design curricular materials to meet their needs. When I saw the problems with the students' technical writing in the first year of my tenure, I created this experience to meet their needs. I also trained 12 people on how to deliver this lesson to their classrooms.
Key Learning Elements
01: Lead in with laughter
The hallmarks of good technical writing are concision and precision. To introduce the learners to the importance of clarity in communication, I opened the lesson with a fun and silly intro about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Humor is an important component of learning; neuroscience reveals that humor activates the dopamine reward center, and dopamine is known to be involved in motivation and learning.
PB & J Directions
Instructors started the lesson by asking the students to tell them how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The instructor had all the ingredients with them and they would perform whatever steps were called out.
Given the set of instructions above, this is what I did with the sandwich ingredients. Everyone in the classroom laughed, and it quickly became clear how imprecise we can be with language.
02: orchestrated confusion & communication
The purpose of a lab report is to communicate findings and to provide the required information so that another group can replicate the experiment. I wanted students to understand how confusing and disorienting it can be to read a lab report that lacks the technical precision required. To target this learning, I crafted an experience that would intentionally create a bit of controlled chaos in the lab.
To achieve this effect, I wrote two lab reports that, when combined, would give you all the requisite information to complete a basic lab technique, however separately the lab reports contained omissions, ambiguities, and imprecise specifications. I wrote the two reports by looking through past lab reports from students and used common student errors and misconceptions.
03: Debriefing in Dialogue
The technique required in the lab report was fairly rudimentary, and all groups were able to complete the work after they figured out how to communicate with each other. After the confusion subsided, a debriefing conversation occurred in the classroom.
04: implementing the learning
After students had worked through the procedures and held their discussion, a short powerpoint was used to walk them through scientific writing best practices. Afterward, students received a full lab report containing common student errors. They were asked to annotate the document and correct any found errors.
Results
•Writing quality was markedly improved on subsequent assignments
• Level of concision in everyday lab communication increased
• Students were better prepared for higher-level coursework