(302d) Improving Student Writing: Drafts & Reflections on Lab Reports

A common lab instructor situation: spend hours upon hours grading incomplete lab reports whose authors have seemingly ignored all provided requirements and detailed grading rubrics. Leave loads of helpful comments, only to have students acknowledge that they only looked at the numerical score - sub-scores if you're lucky - and then go on to make the exact same errors in their next report. I've added two minor assignments to my chemical engineering lab course to address this frustrating experience.

First, a week in advance of each report date students submit the roughest of drafts that is a narrative outline of the full report, with sentences like “...as the concentration increases the viscosity [increased/decreased/stayed constant], which [agrees/disagrees] with the theory found in [need source - maybe fluids textbook?].” Then via an in-class activity, other students review the draft for completeness (has the author addressed each required part of the analysis, even if the details are still TBD?) and for comprehensibility (grammar, sentence structure, organization). In this way writers and their peers identify in advance which parts of the report remain to be analyzed, written or edited. After reports are graded, I assign a reflection assignment on the marked report. Students have to read through my comments to identify what I complimented them on, what I recommend they do different, and then report in a memo on what they will do the same or different in the next such report.

The draft, activity participation, and reflection are all graded on the basis of complete/incomplete, and so does not lead to significantly more time spent grading. Since implementing these assignments, I'm receiving fewer woefully incomplete report submissions, student memo content indicates that students are actually reading my copious feedback, and at least sometimes they use that feedback to improve their subsequent reports. Additionally, the draft prevents students from procrastinating beginning the writing portion of their reports until the day it's due, and the reflection memo has helped me to stop procrastinating grading lab reports since they must be returned to the students in advance of the memo deadline.