September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

Quality on the rise for scientific report writing

Many science and engineering students struggle to understand the unique and specific requirements for report writing in their discipline.

Enter WRISE, a student-centred website created by the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales as part of an ALTC-funded project. The site went live on the first day of first semester this year and is already being used by people as far afield as South America, the US, UK, New Zealand, China and Taiwan.

Project manager Helen Drury from the University of Sydney’s Learning Centre says, 10 years ago the centre found that science and engineering students were unable to attend learning support courses due to their long laboratory times. To address this individual programs within discipline areas have been created that integrate with coursework.

A decade on, WRISE, which stands for ‘write reports in science and engineering’, is an online approach to providing more in-depth support for scientific writing. It is the result of a collaboration between a wide range of specialists in language and academic skills, subject specialists, elearning developers and students.

Ms Drury says the strength of the relationship developed between the Learning Centre and discipline lecturers over the last 10 years, made WRISE possible.

The site brings together learning resources for both language and content organised into nine discipline modules. It uses interactive explanations, example reports and exercises based on authentic student writing to provide help for report writing and understanding content.

Student volunteers also provided crucial input into the design of the site.

“It is critical to involve [students] in the development phase because in an online environment like this, unlike a face-to-face situation, it is hard to monitor how they are understanding what’s on the screen, is it is making sense, are they learning from it,” says Ms Drury.

Feedback from students has been gathered via site-tracking software and a paper-based questionnaire as it is often difficult to get students to fill in an online survey. Ms Drury and her colleagues went to labs to talk to students individually before leaving them with the questionnaire.

“We used a very personal approach and I think that really worked as we got a very good response rate. About 58 per cent of those we spoke to had actually used the site. We really wanted those who hadn’t used it to tell us why.”

By also collecting the student’s marks the team was able to make a comparison between those who had and hadn’t  used the WRISE website and were able to conclude that there had been a clear difference in performance.

“Those who had used the site received better marks and that was controlling for things like past writing experience and confidence in writing,” says Ms Drury.

Academic staff have also been very positive about the WRISE website. www.usyd.edu.au/learningcentre/wrise