Wikipedia in the Science Classroom

Despite research suggesting that writing-to-learn exercises (WTL) in the classroom are associated with increased student learning, WTL is still not widely implemented in science courses. To provide our students with a meaningful WTL exercise that also teaches them how to write for the general public, we incorporated the Wiki Education Classroom Program into scientific writing courses at Ohio University. Our objectives for Wikipedia in the science classroom are two-fold 1) inward facing: teaching students how to critically evaluate and write for the general public, and about how the content of Wikipedia is generated and thus how to use Wikipedia more effectively and 2) outward facing: to increase and enhance scientific content. Students are instructed to select research topics of interest within the scope of the course and related Wikipedia articles to evaluate and edit. Evaluations follow the criteria set forth by Wiki Education and are submitted to the talk page of each corresponding article, enabling the public to view student comments and suggestions. Students then edit their articles based on their evaluations and classroom discussions. Our students have contributed to 99 articles, with 1,514 edits and 83,310 words added, and these articles have been viewed over 2.3 million times. Post-course surveys indicated that students found the exercises to be informative and empowered many to make contributions outside of class.