T. R. Girill
trgirill@acm.org
Technical Literacy Project
September, 2008 (ver. 3)
This handbook explains why anyone should want to teach nonfiction ("technical") writing in high-school science (or other) classes and offers classroom-tested exercises and activities for doing it well.
The content for this book grew out of a community service project. The underlying teaching techniques and student activities discussed here have emerged from a literacy outreach effort in several San Francisco bay area high schools that has been jointly sponsored since 1999 by the East Bay Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and by the Computation Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This on-going Technical Literacy Project seeks to improve the basic (nonfiction) writing skills of underperforming high-school students by adapting real-world science instructions and descriptions into skill-building classroom activities. Later, to expand the project's reach, we added teacher-training workshops hosted by the Edward Teller Education Center (ETEC, then part of the University of California Davis School of Education). In 2007, a one-time grant to LLNL from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science afforded the chance to organize both the student learning materials and the teacher support effort into a four-day professional development "academy" (under the Academies Creating Teacher Scientists program).
In a narrow sense, this handbook packages that professional development academy. It summarizes the background and tools needed to effectively teach technical writing in high-school science class in a format that can be used:
In a broader sense, however, the goal here is simply to publish this general approach to literacy development as well as its specific classroom exercises to promote their wide use. Regard this as a kit of technical writing resources and strategies tested and refined in real high-school classes. This handbook makes these resources available for any teacher, parent, or community leader to share.
Part 1 below explains the many ways in which technical writing is relevant to high-school science classes. It clarifies key terms and distinctions, summarizes the empirical research applied here, and introduces the project's basic pedagogical approach. Part 2 (the classroom resources on writing instructions and descriptions) contains the heart of the student material. Here are the specific activities and cases that we have tried and revised over the project's career, each annotated with usage suggestions for teachers (and links to the explanatory background where appropriate). Part 3 extends and applies this literacy project's basic techniques and insights to other connected but less obvious school contexts (such as talks, notes, and posters).
| Part 1: Explanatory Background |
Part 2: Teaching Resources |
Part 3: Extensions and Applications |
||
| Terminology, | Instruction Guidelines | |||
| Distinctions, | Instruction cases, | |||
| Research: | <-- | exercises and, | ||
| student activities | ||||
| Technical writing | Description Guidelines | Technical talks | ||
| Text usability | Description cases, | Note taking | ||
| Cognitive apprenticeship | <-- | exercises and, | --> | Technical reports |
| ESL and CSI issues | student activities | Science posters |
This chapter introduces writing's place in science, and hence in science classes. A comparative tour of the "universe of text" shows you and your students just how technical writing overlaps with yet differs importantly from other written communication familiar in school and in life. This overview thus provides a good mental model of technical writing's benefits as well as its learnability.
This chapter spells out the official support for building technical literacy now found (1) in high-level education-policy initiatives (such as the Natural Science Education Standards), (2) in mid-level benchmarks for policy implementation (such as those of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), and (3) in the California state content standards for specific grade levels from elementary through high school.
This chapter explains why readers judge technical text just as they rate tools, appliances, or computer software, by its effectiveness, efficiency, and "user" satisfaction. A brief history of such text usability connects it both to its engineering roots and to its skill-building value for struggling student writers. Also introduced here are the three empirical features that make science text usable: ease of understanding, ease of access, and reader relevance.
By "revealing the magic" needed to design effective (usable) science prose (through such proven teaching techniques as externalization, scaffolding, iterative refinement, and connecting to life beyond school), cognitive apprenticeship builds writing skills in science class in the same reliable way that traditional apprenticeship builds trade skills. This chapter also summarizes several classroom successes that used this approach and links it to several nationwide school-improvement efforts.
English learners often have academic language problems that undermine their performance in science classes. This chapter reveals how overt technical writing practice addresses their special needs and helps ESL students develop their cognitive maturity, their ability to use appropriate text signals and science idioms, and the quality of their note taking.
This chapter points out that since good communication is crucial for real-life success in forensic science and crime scene investigation, many classroom technical writing techniques map directly onto CSI career demands for adequate notes, talks, and reports. Students often find this CSI connection motivating.
This is a short self-evaluation chapter for teachers (not for high-school students) pursuing formal professional development. To help quickly get a sense for how all this material fits into the world of high-school science, you can try the (one) general "self-exploration" exercise and (one or two) focused activities (that could even be graded or get e-mail feedback) listed here for each handbook chapter above. (Specific classroom-tested instructional cases for students come in the handbook's Part 2.)
These two chapters contain high-school-level, classroom-tested, skill-building exercises that teach how to write good instructions and good descriptions through a coordinated sequence of worked and scaffolded examples and student activities. Each set of exercises has its own explanatory introduction and comparative reference chart to highlight educational features and roles. Also included are annotated, overt instruction- and description-writing guidelines (student checklists) on which these exercises depend. This chart (also repeated in each resource chapter) shows the general lesson geography:
| Technical Writing Activities for High School | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instructions | Descriptions | |||||||
| Overt guidelines | Overt guidelines | |||||||
| Detect weaknesses facing users | Draft and revise (scaffolded) | Rebuild a description from its parts | ||||||
| In text (kitchen recipes) | In graphics (artist tips) | On a larger scale (home repair) | Draft instructions from trial run | Draft illustrated instructions | Role recognition (household objects) | Rebuilding (large parts, shorter text) | Rebuilding (small parts, longer text) | Revising wisely (heads, figures) |
The basic text-design principles itemized in this project's description-writing guidelines and practiced in its focused exercises also apply to several other common school communication activities with real-life analogs:
For example, underperforming science students are often limited by their poor note-taking or weak technical presentation skills. Such literacy limits then thwart adequate work in class science projects (or adequate communication with peers and teachers about science topics or problems). Integrating usability-based note-taking or talk-giving lessons into science class can thus directly build prerequisite science-enabling skills that make more technical work possible. ESL science students find these communication challenges even greater and hence they stand to gain even more from overt attention to these needs.
Temporarily listed at the end of the description-writing introduction are several "extended description cases" designed to help students learn how to handle these extra communication demands by applying known usability principles. Once again, cognitive apprenticeship is the skill-building educational strategy here. But these extended cases differ from the others in format: these are not themselves packaged lessons or spelled-out exercises. Instead, each one offers a general framework within which you can build many lessons tailored to your specific classes and students. The annotations shared with each "extended case" suggest some possible ways to develop them in your classroom; there are many others.
Also, these last cases are still work in progress. Expect more packaged versions with more examples and more elaborate teaching tips to appear here, in a more systematic way, as these extended cases are reviewed and clarified.