Refining and Piloting a Scientific Writing and Writing Coach Curricula for Undergraduate Interns in STEM

The National Weather Center’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program (NWC REU), funded by the National Science Foundation, is in the process of refining and testing a Scientific Writing Curriculum along with a Writing Coach Training Workshop. These curricula aim to guide undergraduate students through the process of scientific writing to help them see themselves as scientists. The workshops that accompany the curricula have been held online, in-person, and hybrid and emphasize active learning.

The Scientific Writing Curriculum contains eight workshops. The workshops address writing the typical components of scientific papers: title, abstract, introduction, literature review, data and methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. They also give students experience with brainstorming, outlining, revising and editing, and peer review, and they provide for discussion of citing the literature properly. Workshop content is inspired and supplemented by the text Eloquent Science, which provides a further reference for student learning.

The Writing Coach Training Workshop is available to graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, staff, and faculty. Writing coaches learn how to give constructive feedback and enhance their mentoring skills to support individual students in building confidence in and improving their scientific writing. The training workshop includes discussions of what the role of a writing coach is and how to set measurable writing goals and develop action plans to meet those goals.

In summer 2023, both the Scientific Writing Curriculum and Writing Coach Training Workshop were tested in the NWC REU program, and portions of the Scientific Writing Curriculum were tested at two external REU-type program sites. Evaluations from students, mentors, and/or writing coaches across these sites are being analyzed to understand how students’ perceptions of their scientific communication skills changed during their internship. Students were asked what they attribute any changes in their self-assessed skill level to and how, if at all, the workshop(s) contributed to that. All students were asked for their input on the usefulness of the workshops and how to improve the curriculum and associated activities. Students also were asked if they had a writing coach and what influenced their decision on whether to be paired with one. Those who reported having a writing coach were asked at what stages in their writing they met with that coach and how the sessions did or did not help them. A separate survey was sent to writing coaches to understand when and how they met with their coachees, how they approached their coaching, and their experiences with the tools practiced in the training, if used.

These efforts are undertaken with the goal of making these training materials widely available to REUs and REU-like programs. We are recruiting additional pilot sites for summer 2024 and are working to make the curricula and workshops more flexible. In particular, we are adapting the Scientific Writing Curriculum to be more relevant for both poster and oral presentations, and we are creating shortened versions for use by programs with limited time for workshops.