Gan Moodley and Deborah Robertson-Andersson. Presented at AMS Colloquium 2015.

1. The use of rubrics in enhancing student’s scientific writing skills in a variety of
disciplines in the Life Sciences
The use of a detailed prescriptive rubric in evaluating student performance in a second
level marine biology module incorporating four life science fields; geological science,
marine-biology, chemistry and oceanography is investigated. Subjective marking
occurred in 2013 and showed highly significant positive and negative bias. Students
expressed difficulty in practical report writing and generally lacked the understanding
of scientific paper writing methodologies. Rubrics assess student products and
performance but are seldom used in life sciences. Drawing from theories of
constructivism a rubric could be seen acting as a scaffold for student learning and task
performance. Blooms six category cognitive domain was used in the creation and
application of the rubric which was criterion referenced. Rubrics consisted of a set of
scoring criteria and point values associated with these criteria, which were grouped
into categories so the instructor and the student could discriminate among the
categories by level of performance. Analysis of 2014 results showed no marking bias
across all 4 disciplines and there was a mean increase from the first report to the last
report of 22 % (+ 10). Most students benefited and this translated to a 22 % increase
in overall pass marks from 2013 to 2014.
KEYWORDS
Scientific writing, rubrics, life sciences, skills development,