Date

8-29-2024

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Master of Arts in Composition (MA)

Chair

Amanda Dunnagan

Keywords

scientific authorial voice, undergraduate chemistry, explicit instruction, writing instruction, chemistry discourse

Disciplines

English Language and Literature | Rhetoric and Composition

Abstract

The effective development of undergraduate chemistry students for success in professional and academic careers involves emphases on content knowledge and on writing and authorial voice. Unfortunately, most undergraduate chemistry instruction wholly neglects writing and authorial voice instruction in favor of content knowledge instruction. This results in the development of chemistry students who know the content of their field but not how to communicate that knowledge or how to enter the chemistry discourse with their own research. This integrative review identified 71 pieces of scholarly literature and synthesized these sources to reconceptualize writing instruction in undergraduate chemistry and propose explicit instruction on scientific authorial voice as a solution. The review identified three main themes, focusing on the inclusion of explicit instruction alongside content-area instruction, the social and process-related elements of effective explicit instruction, and core values of strategies for explicit instruction highlighted in the literature. The findings of this research indicate that explicit instruction on scientific authorial voice may be a solution to the lack of writing instruction in undergraduate chemistry courses and call for further research to ground these findings in qualitative empirical research and test them in undergraduate chemistry classrooms.

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