Design and assessment of an assignment-based curriculum to teach scientific writing and scientific peer review

Abstract

A writing-intensive, upper-level undergraduate course which integrates content, context, collaboration, and communication in a unique fashion, is described. The topic of the seminar is “Scientific Writing in Chemistry” and an assignment-based curriculum was developed to instruct students on best practices in all aspects of science communication and to educate students about the scientific publication process and peer review. To effectively teach students how to understand science, both the content and the process must be included. Peer review is an integral and essential part of the process of science and the peer review tasks in the course described in this paper evolve from rubric-based peer assessments to free-format peer review. The curriculum was developed for a semester-long, three-hour seminar with limited enrolment. The curriculum was taught in the Spring semesters of 2010 - 2014 and enrolment data and results of evaluations collected over four years are presented to demonstrate the success of the implementations