Investigating the effects of writing support on lab reports‘ quality and content-related learning gains in chemistry

Lab reports are one of the most important text types in science education and especially relevant in chemistry (Bayrak, 2020, KMK, 2019). They represent the scientific inquiry process (Rönnebeck et al., 2016) which provides students with the possibility to reflect on their scientific thinking. When writing a lab report students face different sections with their individual characteristics in terms of both structural and language related challenges (Bayrak, 2020, Beese & Roll, 2015). Nonetheless, writing enables an in-depth examination of the content to be learned as it causes a deceleration of students‘ thinking processes and thus, allow them to reflect on their thinking (Beese & Roll, 2015; Rivard & Straw, 2000). Regarding writing in science class, two major approaches can be distinguished. When using the Writing to Learn approach (Hand et al., 2007; Sampson et al., 2013; Schmölzer-Eibinger & Thürmann, 2013) the major goal of writing is to make sense out of the (science) content. In contrast, Learning to Write (Graham et al., 2015; Sampson et al., 2013) focusses on discipline specific writing and the characteristics of scientific language in order to promote students to write better scientific texts. Within the FinChen-project, support measures for lab report writing have been developed based on these two approaches. With respect to the Writing to Learn approach, epistemic support is used, which represent the structure of the lab reports’ sections. Considering the idea of Learning to Write, students receive either word aids and sentence structures or an example lab report. Additionally, both types of support are combined. The support measures are evaluated regarding their effect on students’ lab report quality as well as their content-related learning gains using an intervention study in a pre-post test design. Lab report quality will be rated using a self-developed coding manual.