Communicating science effectively to a variety of audiences is a highly desired skill in science graduates. With respect to written communication, the works students are asked to create often require skill sets that they have limited opportunities to develop during their secondary education. This makes scaffolding crucial for students, particularly for those in transition. Here we present our scaffolding strategies aimed to enhance the development of written communication skills for students in a large first-year biology unit. Our students engaged in multiple communication assessments – a pitch to the editor of ‘The Conversation’, writing an article in the style of ‘The Conversation’, and a scientific report – whilst exploring their interests around social determinants of health, human evolution and biology. We share how these tasks were designed to feedforward to subsequent assessments, as well as our approaches in scaffolding the tasks through assessment briefs, marking rubrics, supporting resources and personalised one-on-one feedback sessions.
Teaching@Sydney