Becoming STEM Writers: A Low-Cost Intervention for Teaching Argumentation

To truly prepare our students for STEM careers, we must move beyond assignments that simply summarize or replicate established findings and begin engaging them in rhetorical conversations (i.e., argumentation) in the field. We realized that our undergraduate students struggled to engage in scientific argumentation. Therefore, our interdisciplinary team leveraged expertise from literacy education to provide three workshops to help students identify, evaluate, and engage in scientific argumentation. As in many undergraduate science courses, we were limited in the amount of time we could devote to these workshops, and thus focused on three key areas: establishing a purpose and claim; identifying the purpose and claim in published writing; and organizing writing to support a claim. Not only did we observe a change in students’ oral argumentation, survey results also demonstrated that students felt more confident in different areas of STEM literacy. We provide a detailed description of our intervention and identify the key elements of its success. The low cost (in terms of time and resources) of our intervention will support replication in other contexts.