Implementing the Science Writing Heuristic in the Chemistry Laboratory

The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) is an instructional technique that combines inquiry, collaborative learning, and writing to change the nature of the chemistry laboratory for students and instructors. The SWH provides a format for students to guide their discussions, their thinking, and writing about how science activities relate to their own prior knowledge via beginning questions, claims and evidence, and final reflections. The SWH approach helps students do inquiry science laboratory work by structuring the laboratory notebook in a format that guides students to answer directed questions instead of using a traditional laboratory report. In this approach, students must make a claim (inference) about what was learned through the laboratory experiment and provide evidence to support that claim. Then, through reflective writing, students continue to negotiate meaning from experiment(s) they conducted. This article provides instructors an overview of how to implement the SWH in their chemistry laboratory course.