An Active Learning and Draft‐Revision Approach to Teaching Scientific Writing to Undergraduate Physiology Students

The comprehension and communication of scientific literature are critical in training prospective scientists, yet undergraduate students are rarely exposed to these concepts in their STEM courses. To this end, we designed and implemented a series of mini‐workshops focusing on scientific evaluation and writing. Five undergraduates participated in these pilot workshops during weekly lab meetings. The first workshop taught students how to select and critically evaluate a peer‐reviewed paper for journal club. Students discussed the guidelines for authorship, the importance of assessing the quality of a journal, and how to concisely skim the article prior to choosing it for presentation. The second focused on abstract writing using active learning techniques. The students engaged in a discussion on scientific writing, including formatting, word choice, and style. They were introduced to the required sections of an abstract: title, introduction, animal model, hypothesis, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions. Laminated, cutout headers of each of the abstract components, along with single sentence snippets from a previously published abstract that was unknown to the students were provided for the exercise. As a group, they were tasked with classifying each of the sentences under the section headers. Afterward, students put the sentence cutouts together in a coherent fashion to form the complete abstract. The third workshop had the students use the scientific method to design an experiment. Students were given sample data and asked to write an abstract individually. The workshop leader provided a draft revision including comments and suggested edits. Writing an abstract required students to utilize knowledge from both the first and second workshops, including conducting a literature search, reviewing articles, and writing each portion of an abstract to complete the assignment. These reading and writing workshops elicited positive feedback from the students. They stated that they enjoyed working as a group and felt more prepared to write an abstract. The workshops also improved participation amongst lab members during weekly meetings. Overall, this was a quick, engaging strategy for preparing novice science students for scientific writing. We plan to expand this technique to a larger group of junior‐level physiology students in the spring. This will allow us to compare abstract quality amongst students who participate in the workshops with students who do not participate. From this, we will obtain a better understanding of the effectiveness of this technique as a method of introducing scientific communication to undergraduate physiology students. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .