Employing Peer Review and Revision to Improve Undergraduate Writing in a General Chemistry Lab

This study uses a series of scaffolded writing assignments and interventions to improve student writing quality in a general chemistry lab course. This intervention was tested in a first semester general chemistry lab course across two classes to compare how strong writing was both with and without the intervention. The comparison was made by comparing student ability on a pre-assessment given the first week of class and a final writing assessment turned in the last week of class. The difference between the two classes was that the control class did only these assignments, while the experimental class was provided with interventions during the semester to assist their writing of the paper. Comparison of the two classes at semester’s end showed a significant difference, with a greater gain in writing quality for the class with the intervention. This suggests that the additional time spent on writing in the course did result in a significant improvement on student writing ability.