Combining Chemistry and College Writing: A New Model for an Honors Undergraduate Chemistry Course

Faculty in the Departments of Chemistry and English at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) have designed and implemented an innovative, writingintensive, advanced, second-semester chemistry course combined with a laboratory component that satisfies both second semester General Chemistry and College Writing criteria. This unusual configuration differs from typical honors chemistry courses because of its “writing to learn” approach to teaching indepth scientific content, the nature of research, and research methods. The opportunity to develop this course emerged from a collaborative relationship between our institution’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and our chemistry department. While most writing intensive initiatives, such as the “Writing like a Chemist” project (Stoller, Jones, Costanza-Robinson, & Robinson, 2005), are designed for upper-division courses (Goodman & Bean, 1983; Paulson, 2001; Stoller, 2005; Shibley, 2001; Whelan & Zare, 2003), some attempts have been made to incorporate writing at the freshman level; these include parallel courses that require students to be “co-registered” in a writing course that is linked with a science course taught by professors of the respective disciplines (Griffin, 1985; Wilkinson, 1985). Other initiatives include using laboratory reports that incorporate more extensive writing than traditional laboratory reports (Kovac & Sherwood, 1999; Tilstra, 2001). The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) is an example of this approach (Greenbowe & Hand, 2005; Hand & Keys, 1999; Keys & Hand, 1999; Rudd & Greenbowe, 2001; Rudd & Greenbowe, 2002). To the best of our knowledge, however, no course that combines first-year chemistry and English has been developed before. We believe that this course creates an excellent foundation for assisting students in acquiring skills for reflection and self-assessment in chemistry and writing, introduces the practice of formulating scientific ideas through writing, improves communication skills between students and professors, and improves professional skills. We discuss the collaborative efforts that resulted in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop our course, and we provide an overview of our approach, course materials, methods of instruction, and implementation. APPROACH: WAC Over the past thirty-five years, the WAC movement emerged in higher education by incorporating writing components into the curriculum across disciplines. The fundamental principles of WAC are that writing is the most efficient tool for acquiring critical-thinking skills and that having students perform welldesigned writing assignments is the best way to engage them in the subject matter (Bean, 2001). Barnes and colleagues (1989) demonstrate that writing is a vehicle for learning science meaningfully because it places importance on students being able to understand and explain clearly the meaning of fundamental scientific concepts (Glynn & Muth, 1994; Holliday, Yore, & Alvermann, 1994). Studies indicate that writing affords a “minds-on” emphasis in learning science and can function as a conceptual tool for assisting students in analysis, interpretation, and communication of scientific ideas (Bean, 2001; Beall, 1998; Glynn, 1994). A course that emphasizes writing as a process and develops critical thinking will challenge and motivate students, regardless of the subject matter. After a three-day Writing Across the Curriculum workshop, participants from chemistry discussed with the director of WAC the possibility of developing an alternative course for College Writing II that would fulfill the university WAC guidelines for such classes. Over the course of a year, we employed these guidelines to develop an innovative six-credit second semester General Chemistry course as a College Writing II equivalent. The syllabus (see Appendix) outlines the scientific topics to be covered as well as the writing components included throughout the course.