Study on the Art of Scientific Report Writing: Emulation of Style

From the perspective of the assessor, the marking of student scientific reports often comprises one of the most frustrating aspects of the work experience. As an expert researcher, the assessor has undertaken the task of scientific report and paper writing many times [1] has acted also as referee to others' paper submissions and as a result has become accustomed to excellence in these endeavours. Despite these frustrations, educationalists and those whose views are based more on knowledge of the school/university transition argue that assessors should not expect students to possess natural inherited skills in this area. McComb, notably, has shown that students need guidance [2] and other studies suggest that students can not only fail to improve their skills but can actually regress in their effectiveness if too much is expected too early [3]. In the seminal work of Carruthers et al. [4] students' literary capabilities were observed to regress [3,5,6] to those expected of their non-university peer group. There is therefore a need to understand what motivates students towards excellence in report writing. In this study, we carry out an exercise in effective report writing and show that with simple attention to the style adopted by others, students can readily solve the problem of the school/university transition and develop a professional style of writing. Our study involves the preparation of a mock scientific report that is made available to students following a lecture held at the beginning of the term. It is designed to present the basic problems encountered by assessors when marking student reports and give an example of the style of writing and layout that are acceptable to the scientific community. We then draw some comparisons of marks achieved after using these methods with those obtained previously and compare them with the hypothetical Hase theoretical model [5]. We finally draw conclusions regarding the effectiveness of our new approach.