Student Models Improve College-level Science Writing

Background. Recent writing research has yielded new interventions for improving college-level composition, but less has been done regarding the high-level reading, reasoning, and writing necessary for research report writing. Methods. In the present research, this writing takes the form of annotated bibliographies based on primary source material. The current research provides three conditions of instruction in a fixed order within-subjects design, first, a writing thesis and support scoring guide, second, an instructor-commented student model, and third, both the scoring guide and the student model. The scoring guide is based on traditional methods that include detailed grading rubrics and focuses the student on the final grade. The student model is based on observational learning and focuses the student on revision. Results. Students were found to write better assignments when asked to focus on revision processes rather than grades. A process approach explains how writing proceeds from planning, to sentence generation processes, to revision in recursive cycles. Conclusions. Advanced college students still have difficulty writing science reports and can benefit from reminders to focus on how to revise and to do it often. Students with higher reading comprehension and health science reasoning scores have higher quality writing samples under all three instructional conditions, but especially in the process approach. For these students, even a one-shot, single instruction period following a process approach yielded better quality writing than a product approach. Higher reasoning and reading comprehension skill may afford better strategic control over product and process strategy use since these variables predicted reliable variance in quality. Grants. The authors would like to thank the NSU College of Allied Health and Nursing and the PFRDG award program for support of this research