Teaching professional writing in organic chemistry lab courses

CHED 89

Peter J. Alaimo, alaimop@seattleu.edu, Joseph M. Langenhan, langenha@seattleu.edu, and Jennifer Loertscher, loertscher@seattleu.edu. Department of Chemistry, Seattle University, 901 12th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122
Teaching students to read and write scientific papers is a key learning objective in many courses. At many schools, it is expected that students write a thesis on a capstone research project that they conduct in collaboration with a faculty advisor. In our capstone course we have found that students have difficulty writing in a professional style. Since it is unreasonable to expect that students would know how to write in this specialized way without training, we have redesigned the post-laboratory learning exercises in our sophomore organic lab courses to teach students the fundamentals of writing a scientific full paper. We will present our approach and the assessment results we have obtained to date.
 

General Posters
7:30 PM-9:30 PM, Sunday, August 19, 2007 BCEC -- Exhibit Hall - B2, Poster

Sci-Mix
8:00 PM-10:00 PM, Monday, August 20, 2007 BCEC -- Exhibit Hall - B2, Sci-Mix

Division of Chemical Education

The 234th ACS National Meeting, Boston, MA, August 19-23, 2007