Abstract ID 15695

Poster Board 596

Scientific scholarly writing is an important skill in pharmacology and other fields in science. Despite a strong focus on writing in many courses, faculty and students have disparate expectations related to scholarly writing. Exploration of student expectations may lead to more effective teaching strategies in the area of scientific scholarly writing in pharmacology. Herein, we present a classroom exercise where students were asked to write a rubric that would be used to score a summative assessment (worth 20% of their grade) in an undergraduate pharmacology class. This was done in a 300-level undergraduate course titled “Foundations of Pharmacology". The course is targeted for upper-division biology and chemistry undergraduates. It is a writing intensive course that counts towards the university wide core curriculum as a writing flag. In this course, students are introduced to the basics of pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics, systems pharmacology, and drug development. Their final assignment is to explore Social Pharmacology by choosing a drug that has been impacted by societal factors, develop a thesis statement, and write a literature review supporting their thesis. They complete a series of scaffolded assignments including submission of a thesis statement, a synthesis grid of their citations, and peer review. Before beginning any work on their papers, students spend a 50-minute class period in pre-established groups writing the rubric that will be used to score their final product. They are provided with a list of elements that may represent good writing (ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation), then asked to define what effectively demonstrating these elements would look like, and what weight they give to each element (if any). Students weighed “ideas” heavier than any other category (42 ±26%), followed by “organization” (13±13%), “voice” (12+12%), “conventions (11±6%)", “word choice” (10±10%), “presentation” (7±8%), and “sentence fluency” (5±4%) (n=5 groups, 23 students). One group gave 20% to elements not listed. For comparison, we mapped our established departmental writing rubric to these elements. This rubric gave 25% weight to ideas, and the remaining elements were given 12.5% weights respectively. While there is a slight difference in what students and faculty perceive as important in scholarly writing, this demonstrates that students can be given ownership over these expectations without compromising pedagogy. There was also disparity between student groups, for example the weight assigned to “ideas” ranged from 12.5-70%. Students reported improvements in their scientific writing ability their end of semester course evaluations. Lastly, this is an example of how an undergraduate pharmacology course can be incorporated into the core curriculum of a university which will increase the reach of the class and expose more undergraduates to the field of pharmacology.

This work was supported by the Xavier University Center for Teaching Excellence through a Faculty Learning Community.