Integrating reflection and annotation into writing tasks for science undergraduates

Abstract

Communicating scientific ideas well is an important part of a scientist’s role. Consequently, considerable time is allocated to developing writing skills in undergraduate science education. Traditionally educators have assessed writing skills by looking at a final output written by students. Artificial intelligence (including large language models like ChatGPT) poses many significant challenges for assessment, most notably ensuring academic integrity. Educators and policy makers in higher education are debating the best approaches to increase the validity and security of assessments with innovations in curriculum and assessment design. A common recommendation to address concerns with artificial intelligence technologies is for educators is to include assessment tasks that evidence the process of learning, including reflective elements of this process. In this paper I provide a rationale for incorporating reflection and annotation into writing tasks for undergraduate science students. I describe several approaches for how this can be achieved with small changes to traditional written assessment tasks: practical reports, research reports, literature reviews and science communication tasks.