Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning

September 15th, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 5 Background
Laboratory experiences play a central role in science education. Calls for reform in science education have emphasized the very goals that we strive for when developing laboratory curricula: inquiry-based research experiences that develop students’ science process and communication skills. ¹ Despite creating inquiry-based experiences for my students in introductory biology laboratories, I have been less satisfied with student outcomes (i.e., lab reports) and their assessment. I was dismayed that some students lean heavily on their more engaged lab partners during the design and execution of an experiment, but then go home and, using data others had worked hard to generate, write a decent lab report that nevertheless shows little scientific creativity. Conversely, students who may be fully engaged in carrying out the experiment have trouble writing a decent report. Moreover, as lab educators, we strive to create lab experiences that expose students to the process of science as realistically as possible. We embrace the pedagogy of collaborative learning and stress that science itself is a collaborative endeavor, but then what do we do? After we have students design and carry out experiments in a group, and maybe analyze the data in a group, we make them go their separate ways to write a lab report. But that’s not how science is done; it is very hard to find primary articles in the research literature written by one author. We have students collaborate for part of the science process and then send them into solitary confinement to finish the process. Perhaps this is why students hate lab reports so much. (Admittedly, I don’t think many lab instructors like lab reports all that much either.)

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The “I Hate Lab Reports” Facebook page, circa 2011.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 3 Collaborative writing
Students fail to see the purpose of the lab report; they see it as a summary of the experiment that reports the “right answer” for a grade. Instead, we need to emphasize science writing as an important part of the collaborative process of science, and show that lab reports are an authentic learning activity that allow for engagement of the material. Collaborative writing provides opportunities for peer instruction that promote critical thinking, enhance decision-making skills, and deepen understanding of the scientific concepts being studied. I had previously tried having students submit group lab reports, but that often leads to one person doing the bulk of the work, and I could never determine who contributed meaningfully to the finished product. That was a major sticking point – how do I evaluate the contribution and participation of each group member?

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 This need to assess individual contributions moved me to examine online collaborative writing tools such as GoogleDocs and wikis that store every version of the document. Instructors can compare document versions (using the history log), and can therefore verify and evaluate individual student contributions. Educators have recently started to use wikis to support collaborative and constructivist learning. ² Educational use of wikis in the sciences has been relatively rare, and usually involved with class notes, but Elliott and Fraiman report on chemistry classes using web-based collaborative lab reports. Their “Chem-Wiki” web space allows student research teams to discuss and report on experimental findings outside of lab time. ³ Since I rely heavily on our college’s learning management system (Moodle) in the laboratory course, I felt it would be better to use a tool within Moodle itself, so I had students in introductory biology use Moodle’s wiki module for collaborative writing of laboratory reports.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 The wiki “history log” displays every change made to the document and provides a way to assess individual contributions to the group report. Users may compare any two versions.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The wiki platform allows users to track changes to the document, compare different versions side-by-side, and assess individual student contributions to the group report, as shown above and below.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Click to zoom in and view side-by-side comparisons of different versions of a wiki report.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 3 Implementation
The wikis were set up so that each group sees and can edit only their own wiki. After instructions on how to use the wiki module, all student groups first wrote a “practice wiki report,” which allowed all lab instructors to help with any technical problems. All reports had a structured organization that followed the typical lab report format. Student roles were clearly defined — for each report, each student wrote different sections (Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion are all separate “pages” in the wiki), and then all students contributed peer review comments on all sections. The original author of each section then used those comments to write a final version. One student had the role of “Principal Investigator” (PI), which meant they were responsible for finalizing the report, checking for good flow from section to section, similar style, etc. Roles were rotated for subsequent reports, so each student had a turn at being the “PI,” and each student got to write every section of a report. Table 1 depicts these student roles.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Table 1: Student roles for a lab report wiki.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 4 Students were told that both their writing and their contributions to other students’ writing would be assessed. This forces students to reflect upon the quality of their contribution as they review and comment on their peers’ writing. ⁴ I graded each section of the report (based upon a rubric shared with students) and evaluated contributions made by each student. Each contribution received a score of 0 (essentially worthless), 1 (somewhat useful), or 2 (good, useful comment). Nancovska Serbec et al. note that the quality of contributions rather than the quantity is important in assessing student wiki work. ⁵ I had students submit a “Team Member Assessment” after every report so I had peer grades for each student. Students’ grades were determined by a combination of: (1) the grade on the report section they wrote, (2) their “contribution factor,” which is their total contribution score relative to the group’s average contribution score, (3) their peer review grades assigned by other group members, and (4) the grade on the completed full report.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 1 One of the typical benefits of collaborative work using wikis was the peer-to-peer learning that took place, as illustrated in the screenshot below. Students that are more successful would guide less successful students in their writing and understanding of concepts, often pointing out requirements from the rubric or from the writing guidelines that were missed. In some cases, those less successful students would see the working habits and thought processes of the successful students, resulting in a helpful lesson that (I hope) lasted much longer than the writing assignment.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Click to zoom in and read comments by group members about each other’s writing in a wiki report.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 2 Assessment and Discussion
To assess the impact of collaborative writing with wikis, I compared the two years of the course with group wiki writing to the two years prior without group writing. Student performance on assignments (lab report grades) was not affected by collaborative writing with wikis. However, student perceptions of the course and of their gains from wiki writing were affected. There was a shift toward a more positive perception (chi-square test for independence; all P<0.05). In this positive shift, more students agreed that (1) the amount of work during lab sessions was appropriate to the time available, (2) the total workload for lab was appropriate, (3) the lab handout readings were clear, and (4) students had opportunities for extra help. The first two perceptions are not surprising; with students writing only part of a report instead of a whole report, they should feel that the workload is lessened. I don’t think students perceive the time spent commenting on the work of peers is as onerous as the time spent writing reports. The last two perceptions were unexpected, because at first glance, they don’t seem to be related to group writing. However, since peers were always at hand to answer questions or make comments on each other’s work, students felt less abandoned during the learning process. No matter the reasons for this shift in perception, any such positive shift can increase student engagement. ⁶ Even though student grades on assignments were not improved by group wiki writing, the beneficial effects of positive student perception toward such a large introductory science course should not be ignored.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Students’ perceptions of group reports relative to individual reports were also positive. The majority (62-75%) of students reported that, compared to writing individual reports (as they did in the previous semester’s introductory course), writing group reports: (1) helped their understanding of the concepts presented, (2) helped improve their scientific writing, (3) helped them think about the strengths and weaknesses of their writing, and (4) helped increase confidence in their ability to write scientifically.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Students’ open-ended responses were very similar. Typical, positive responses talked about the beneficial aspects of peer learning and the less stressful workload:

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 “It made effective use of my time during the year. The lab reports offered a chance to more fully investigate the labs we conducted without the effort of writing a whole lab report. At the same time we were able to learn how to write better because of the feedback from our group and also by observing other’s work.”

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 1 “It helped foster a greater understanding of the course material. It was helpful to discuss topics in a group and listen to other peoples ideas.”

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 “I felt it was much more helpful to only have one section to focus on as opposed to an entire lab report. It took a lot of stress off.”

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Typical negative responses were related to group members not doing their fair share within a reasonable time:

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 3 “Using the wiki was fine but I hated having group projects I felt like my grade in this class suffered because of my group members and their inefficiency to get their work done.”

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 1 “Not all group members contributed equally or put in their best effort into the report so more work was left with some individuals.”

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 1 Another benefit of group wiki lab reports was that, rather than simply edit someone else’s writing, students would post comments with tips for improving a group member’s writing. This leads to a higher level of ownership and responsibility on the part of each student towards what they have written. ⁷ Using peer reviews and group discussion in the wikis, the focus is not only on the content of the finished lab report, but also on science writing as a creative and iterative process. ⁸

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 About the author: Michael O’Donnell is a Principal Lecturer and Laboratory Coordinator in the Department of Biology at Trinity College, Connecticut. His teaching philosophy is to get students to be active participants in the creative process of science.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Notes:

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0
National Research Council, National Science Education Standards (The National Academies Press, 1996), http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=4962; National Research Council, Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning (The National Academies Press, 2000), http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9596. ↩
Kevin Parker and Joseph Chao, “Wiki as a Teaching Tool,” Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects 3, no. 1 (2007): 57–72, http://editlib.org/p/44798. ↩
Edward W. Elliott and Ana Fraiman, “Using Chem-Wiki To Increase Student Collaboration through Online Lab Reporting,” Journal of Chemical Education 87, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 54–56, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed800022b. ↩
Xavier de Pedro Puente, “New Method Using Wikis and Forums to Evaluate Individual Contributions in Cooperative Work While Promoting Experiential Learning:: Results from Preliminary Experience,” in Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis, WikiSym ’07 (New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2007), 87–92, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1296951.1296961. ↩
I.N. Šerbec, M. Strnad, and J. Rugelj, “Assessment of Wiki-supported Collaborative Learning in Higher Education,” in 2010 9th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET), 2010, 79–85, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITHET.2010.5480060. ↩
David L. Neumann and Michelle Hood, “The Effects of Using a Wiki on Student Engagement and Learning of Report Writing Skills in a University Statistics Course,” Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 25, no. 3 (2009): 382–398, http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/neumann.html. ↩
Ina Blau and Avner Caspi, “Sharing and Collaborating with Google Docs: The Influence of Psychological Ownership, Responsibility, and Student’s Attitudes on Outcome Quality,” in Proceedings of the E-Learn 2009 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education, Vancouver, Canada (Chesapeake, VA: AACE, 2009), 3329–3335, http://www.openu.ac.il/research_center/download/Sharing_collaborating_Google_Docs.pdf. ↩
This essay was originally delivered at a conference presentation, and the slides are available at Michael O’Donnell, “Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning” (presented at the Teaching Millenials in the New Millennium, Center for Teaching and Learning conference, Trinity College, Hartford CT, April 2011), http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/millennials/5. ↩

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3 Comments on the whole Page

Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:42 am

I’m so glad to see a scientist participating in this project.
Jason Mittell October 28, 2013 at 9:59 pm

Agreed that it’s excellent to have a science writing perspective, and this is an excellent case study to explore. It might be worth framing the course more explicitly in terms of level, size & composition (majors, prereqs, etc.). Also at the end there is a slippage between the grades maintaining their same level, and the implication that the quality of the lab reports did not change. Is this true? Or were the grades different than quality because of the participation factor? Would be worth discussing more.
by the Editors March 19, 2014 at 10:06 am

Your essay, “Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning,” has been accepted (with revisions) for the final draft of this volume. Several readers praised the inclusion of a lab science writing component in this set of essays, and we believe that it will encourage your science colleagues (and many humanities educators) to rethink their current pedagogy. We recommend that you consider Jason Mittell’s comment about reframing the essay with more context of the course level and student composition, as well as the writing quality issue he mentions at the end. Several commenters suggested ways to revise the introduction. Also, Carol Clark asked you to address what may be lost (for better or worse) by spending class time on the collaborative writing process (see also here), and Kate Singer encouraged you to expand on the same issue while recognizing the benefits of evaluating both individual and group contributions. See also Carol’s request to define your terms (collaborative vs. constructivist) in paragraph 4. Finally, Barbara Fister and Carol both suggested ways in which you could reflect on your findings in the concluding paragraphs.

The current draft word count is 2043 (as measured by WordPress), and the final version should not exceed 2200, so think carefully about making cuts as well as additions. The deadline for submitting your final draft is Thursday May 15th, though sooner is always better. This is a firm deadline, and if you do not meet it, we cannot guarantee that your essay will advance to the final volume. In the next few days, we will post further instructions on how to resubmit and edit your text in our PressBooks/WordPress platform.

5 Comments on paragraph 1

Leigh Wright October 4, 2013 at 9:30 am

This first paragraph is really long. I wonder about breaking it somewhere, perhaps with the section beginning with “Conversely …”
Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 1:07 pm

Mike, I really enjoyed reading your paper and thinking about how collaborative work can help students in the social sciences engage with the material.

One of the commentators suggested breaking the first paragraph into two separate paragraphs. I agree. One possibility would be to start the second paragraph with “Moreover, as lab educators . . . ” since that begins the discussion about collaboration in the sciences.

I am also wondering if you could add a sentence about what is lost (for the students, and perhaps even for the instructor) when students are sent away to write a lab report in isolation. Not only do they break with scientific practice, but also — I am guessing — they lose out in terms of their own learning and learning with colleagues.
Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 1:09 pm

Mike, here’s one last comment on paragraph 1: you state that lab instructors don’t like reports all that much. Can you state why? Is it the lack of creativity in the reports? Is it that the majority of them are not written well? This might also be part of the “loss” when students are asked to write reports in isolation.
Jaime Phillips October 17, 2013 at 8:42 am

I completely agree that we should write lab reports collaboratively because that better mirrors the scientific process. I think this paragraph is a little too long, especially for an introductory paragraph. Perhaps you could split it at “Moreover, as lab educators…” Also, I think it might be interesting if you briefly explained why instructors don’t like lab reports either.
Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:44 am

I agree that this first paragraph is unduly long; in contrast to the end of the essay, where I thought that the paragraphs were too short.

0 Comments on paragraph 2

3 Comments on paragraph 3

Siobhan Senier September 16, 2013 at 9:27 am

I very much admire the intervention you are making here. Students in the humanities often do not understand writing as a collaborative activity (no doubt because many of their profs don’t understand it that way). Meanwhile, many of my colleagues in science seem to feel that students should just learn to write in Freshman Comp. Of course that’s not the way it works, and you are outlining an approach that could have such beneficial effects on student writing across campus. Hats off to you.
Kate Singer September 18, 2013 at 12:09 pm

I agree with Siobhan’s comment and would add, by way of emphasis, that the wiki approach gives a great model for helping to solve the problem of grading and evaluation for collaborative projects and writing. I do wonder about the labor here–are collaborative wikis more time consuming for students and instructors to write and grade? Or does the time issue become less central with a more interactive format?
Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:40 am

I wonder if instructors in business or other disciplines which routinely assign group projects both to assess individual contributions–or do they just grade the whole, and that’s the grade everyone gets.

Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 1:28 pm

Mike, can you define what you mean by collaborative and constructivist learning? How do the two differ? I think about collaborative learning as an approach that accepts a constructivist notion of how learning occurs.
Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 1:36 pm

I am wondering if this paragraph can be split into two. The first paragraph would be about “getting started,” and the second paragraph about how the different roles work.

The section on the different roles might be slightly rewritten — I had to stop a couple of times to think about what each student was doing. One possibility would be to communicate this part in a step by step fashion.

– Students are assigned a specific section for each report, and each section (Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion) has its own wiki page.

– Each student must submit peer review comments on each section.

Etc.

However, it may be disruptive to the flow of the text to reorganize the paragraph in this fashion. Another possibility would be to put the table before the details of each student role.
Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:37 am

I like the idea of calling one of the students PI each time.

0 Comments on paragraph 9

4 Comments on paragraph 10

Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 2:01 pm

I was very interested to see how you graded each student — their own writing and their contributions to the work of others. After reading this paragraph, I wasn’t sure if I understood fully your grading scheme. The student’s contribution factor was a relative score based on his or her total score in comparison to the group’s average score. Is the group’s average score received by summing up each member’s total score and then dividing by the number of group members?

More generally, Mike, can you talk a little about your own investment in this approach to lab reports? As an instructor, do you find that it is more/less time-consuming grading lab reports now? Do you find it more enjoyable reading the reports now? And, do you find that you are taking a lot of time to review (through the history log) each student’s contributions and evaluating the quality of those contributions? Have you found that your evaluation of a student’s contribution matches closely the peer review grades assigned by the other group members? If there is not a close alignment, what do you think is going on?
1. Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:45 am
  
  Great suggestion to talk about your own response to reading lab reports.
Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:39 am

It seems to me like it’s inviting a whole lot of extra work for an instructor to have to read versions of a report to assess each student’s contribution. Can you talk about how much time you think that added to the process of grading?
1. Jason Mittell October 28, 2013 at 9:49 pm
  
  But you’d be grading 1/4 the number of reports this way, allowing for much more granular attention to the process & drafts.

1 Comment on paragraph 11

Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 2:06 pm

Mike, you emphasize the benefits that less successful students gain from the collaborative nature of the lab reports, from the suggestions they receive from the more successful students and from their observations of how the more successful students work. Can you talk a little about the benefits the more successful students gain from working in a collaborative group? Do they gain by “teaching” ideas and work habits to others?

0 Comments on paragraph 12

2 Comments on paragraph 13

Barbara Fister October 8, 2013 at 8:52 pm

This is a fascinating finding – grades were not improved (meaning the learning of the content or the process the lab was intended to convey wasn’t improved?) but they felt generally as if it was worthwhile and that they benefitted from the interaction among students (except, predictably, for those who felt their group members didn’t come through).

It would be interesting to see whether there are long-term benefits in terms of students retaining an interest in science or (if they aren’t ultimately science majors) if they are more interested in science than those who didn’t have this shared writing experience. That would be a much bigger, longer-term project.

I may have simply not read this carefully enough, but do you ever specify what course this is? I am curious how this affects committed majors who already have had a lot of experience writing in the discipline and those who may be either taking a science course as part of general education or who think they are pre-med in their first year of college until they realize they aren’t doing well enough in bio and chem and change course.
Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 2:39 pm

I second the comments above! Students’ positive experience in an introductory course can shape how they think about science in general. Students may be willing to experiment with other science courses or may consider incorporating more science into their undergraduate experience, even if they choose to major in another area of study (i.e., other division of the college).

Mike, I am wondering if you could add a couple of sentences of your own thoughts (as instructor) as to why the student lab grades did not change. Do you think your own grading standards have changed? Or that you now capture something in your grading scheme that you did not capture beforehand but that helps to explain the lack of change in grades? In other words, can you help to explain the fact that the overwhelming majority thinks their understanding of science and their scientific writing have improved while their grades have not? Is there something lost when a student does not write a report from start to finish?

Kate Singer September 18, 2013 at 12:21 pm

It seems as though this comment and the example above indicate that collaborative writing helped students rehash the secondary material (sources for citation) together, outside of class–and gain a better understnding of it. I’d be interested to hear a bit more about whether this was the case, in thinking about wiki writing as a model for teaching how to integrate secondary sources in humanities. (My sense is that science students learn to read and integrate secondary sources much earlier and more efficiently than humanities students, so I wonder how this lab model might be help me think about how to better teach my lit students, for example, how to write about other sources and then establish their own viewpoint.)

Siobhan Senier September 16, 2013 at 9:32 am

This essay is informative and just a pleasure to read. The one thing I might suggest is a few references to the scholarship *within* Composition Studies on peer evaluation. This student’s (and the next’s) complaint is quite common in literature classes too. But there MUST be people in Comp who have figured out (a) how to make sure workload is more evenly distributed [though I really like your own suggestions, above]; and (b) maybe even more importantly, how to help students THINK about collaboration as something that might FEEL inherently “uneven.” Does that make sense? Short version: I would like to know the current state of the field within Composition Studies on peer eval and collaborative writing.
1. Jack Dougherty September 16, 2013 at 10:06 am
  
  Siobhan, you make several excellent points on Michael’s essay. But I paused on your request for more on the “current state of the field within Composition Studies” on peer evaluation. Were you asking Michael, a biologist, to summarize a field that may be far outside of his specialization? Or are you encouraging other readers (who may know more about this topic) to add their input here?
2. Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:47 am
  
  I was thinking something similar with respect to the pedagogy of group projects. I have no idea what professional reflection on the assigning of group projects says, but this paper made me want to know!

1 Comment on paragraph 21

Carol Clark October 11, 2013 at 2:41 pm

Do you have some new ideas for changes that may address the comments registered in paragraphs 20 and 21? Have you thought about experimenting with the size of the groups? Are you planning to make any changes for next year?

1 Comment on paragraph 22

Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 7:48 am

This did not feel like a concluding paragraph to me, so I was left feeling a little unsettled at the end of the paper.

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