Discipline Specific Writing and Assessment

The first writing assignment I remember doing in Science was in 4th or 5th grade. I had a crazy teacher who really expected a lot of his students. He assigned us an essay on plate tectonics. I remember putting a lot of time and effort into the assignment. After he graded it my teacher praised the writing saying that it was something he would have expected from a high school student. (Many things in his class were harder than anything I did in high school). I learned from my younger brother that he was still giving my essay as an example 5 years later. To this day I still enjoy writing assignments more than many other forms of assignments in classes. That is the last essay I remember writing for a science class until college. I'm sure I wrote one or two more along the way, but nothing that stood out to me.

In junior high science I remember doing a lot of worksheets, but that's about as much writing as we did. In Earth Science we kept a daily journal in which we would place all of our assignments and bell activities. Often this would include observations which we would write. In my high school physics class I had a great teacher who had us keep a lab book. At the beginning of each chapter we would draw a picture in our lab book that related to the topic. At first I thought this was a really dumb waste of time, but as I got more creative I found really fun ways to represent the concepts through drawing. We took notes and wrote lab reports in this lab book and it held a lot of value for me. In my high school biology class we did worksheets, answered questions to videos, and more worksheets it seems like. Writing in this class consisted of writing out your answer.

Tests in these classes were pretty typical, traditional tests. Multiple choice, short answer, T/F, fill in the blanks, and as time went on and our school got a scan-tron.... all multiple choice. I did have one teacher who took what seemed a very unique approach. It wasn't necessarily a science class, but calculus and physics were both authored by Newton. Every day in calculus we would do the typical turn in homework, learn the new lesson, get your next assignment, but one day our teacher handed out notebooks. She told us that every day after her instruction we would need to write out what we had learned in words. This seemed like a horrible idea to me! This was math class. How do you write out how to solve a problem in words anyway? But man did it work. It gave us another way to think about our learning and made us stretch ourselves by forcing us to make sense of all that information. I began to learn that if I could explain the concept well in writing I was probably doing OK, but if not I needed to study the concept more.

I am really really good at multiple choice tests and I like them a lot. So this is hard for me to say, but I do think that the way my science teachers tested my knowledge was pretty limiting. I know that there was a lot I didn't know that I guessed, and a lot I did know that the test never assessed. I think as a teacher I can use many different forms of assessment. I probably will use some more traditional ways, but I think it would be valuable to use essays, projects, performance assessments, or portfolio assessments along with these more traditional ways. I think that writing is a good way for students to organize their thinking and to express what they know. I plan to find ways to incorporate more writing in my science classroom. Most of what I assign will probably be pretty informal, but I think it will help the students learn what I'm teaching in more depth.

Here's a webpage that gives creative ideas for writing in high school:
http://www.education.com/activity/high-school/writing/