Take home messages
- Producing formal, summative writing should happen throughout a unit, as ideas are vetted and established. Summative writing should not only occur as the final activity for a line of inquiry.
- Formal, summative writing does not have to be a lengthy paper. Careful, detailed attention to writing a definition, a succinct explanation, or a representation is something that can be tackled during a single class period, with attention paid to every word.
- This work can help make visible to students the “behind-the-scenes” negotiations that are critical in scientific work: constructing a scientific definition, for example, is neither straightforward nor wholly empirical. It is scientists who determine definitions of terms through ongoing negotiations. Engaging students in constructing definitions can help make the decisions and the social construction of knowledge more transparent, and reduce the appearance of science as a “rhetoric of conclusions.”
- Students should recognize that precision is useful for the purposes of understanding one another and making further progress: if we cannot clearly understand ideas, we lack the transparency necessary to vet an idea, and without clarity, it is difficult to make productive use of an idea. Precision is not something that faculty demand because science uses precise vocabulary but instead because this precision is necessary to accomplish the inquiry we are undertaking.
- The writing that students carefully construct should be used in class: just as a paper is deemed important by the number of citations it has, students will recognize their ideas as important to the degree that these definitions, explanations and representations are taken up in later work and that this later work is facilitated by the clarity of those ideas.
- It is often thought that precision is required to begin scientific inquiry: “testable questions” and “precise definitions” are seen as characteristics of scientific practice, and often required of students at the start of an investigation. This precision, however, is not always present at the start of our inquiry, nor can it be. Instead, precision is a product of ongoing inquiry, and can help shape later inquiries.
- Allow that ideas - even clear, well-constructed, “summative” definitions - will change. This iterative defining is characteristic of science; as theoretical progress is made, our definitions change. Ideas should be accountable to the available evidence, consistent with the current models, and work towards coherence.
- Drafting a consensus statement means that you cannot assign a grade to any one student. These are collaborative efforts as the class works to clarify a particular idea. Solicit input from as many in the class as you can, and structure the conversation to incorporate a range of ideas. Provide feedback throughout the process and hold all students accountable to the idea and its use in their individual assignments.
