Several of the differences between psychology and chemistry students described above are also germane to a comparison of instructors’ expectations and students’ experiences within the disciplines. The largest gap between instructors’ expectations of student writing and students’ experience in psy- chology seems to be in defining discipline-specific writing. The instructors in psychology do not seem to consider most writing assignments in psychology as necessarily discipline-specific. When interviewed, instructors expected students to be able to write in a generally academic manner and cited grammar, organization, and argument as the most important areas for student writing. These qualities are similar to those found as generalized academic standards for writing in Thaiss and Zawacki (2006). Instructors did not expect to have to teach students these qualities of general academic writing, but did expect to teach writing for psychology. As a course was designed specifically for this purpose, (Psyc 3530) instruc- tors of 3000 level and lower courses tend to create assignments they feel do not require disciplinary writing knowledge. Based on the interviews, this usually means assigning writing that does not require following APA (American Psychological Association) standards. Students, however, seem to have a dif- ferent perception of discipline-specific writing. While the students interviewed acknowledged Psyc 3530 as teaching them how to write for psychology, their confusion with writing expectations in their other psychology classes might indicate that these assignments are implicitly discipline-oriented even beyond the instructor’s awareness. As has been pointed out both in the literature and in my interview with Dr.
Spencer, professors are often so steeped in the rhetorical conventions of their disciplines, that they are not aware of the “rhetorical peculiarities of discourse in their own disciplines” (Thaiss & Zawacki, 2006 p.32). This may also be the reason psychology students describe themselves as lacking writing experi- ence—they had not experienced the type of writing assignments they encountered before they took classes in psychology.
In chemistry, the largest discrepancy between the writing expectations of professors and stu- dents also involves the nature of discipline-specific writing. In this case, though, the frustration seems to come from terminology. Students and professors seem to believe they have a common understanding of the meaning of the writing type, lab report. The writing students have been producing throughout their science classes in high school and college has all been classified as lab reports. Because of this, it seems that professors expect students to understand how to write in this genre. There is also a sense that both students and professors feel lab report writing is very straight-forward and somewhat secondary to the experiment itself. The professors interviewed described the results section as the most problematic for students. They felt that many students had difficulty moving from the more procedural sections to the more analytical sections, like the results. Although this could certainly be due to a lack of experience and will develop over time, it could also be due in part to a lack of clear standards and explicit instruc- tion in writing. While some professors reported taking time in class to explain exactly what information should be included in each section, they do not demonstrate the rhetorical strategies used to by chem- ists to write a results section, nor do they provide examples for the students to look at beyond what they show during class. As a result of this misunderstanding, students tend to see instructors’ expecta- tions in chemistry as opaque and idiosyncratic.
6 ANALYZING READING AND WRITING IN PSYCHOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY
The present chapter describes the analysis of course readings and student writing in psychology and chemistry. The results of the multidimensional analysis of each corpus (course readings and student writing) are explored through Gray’s (2011) four Dimensions in sections 6.1-6.4. Section 6.5 gives a summary of the results describing the linguistic features of writing in each corpus.
Analyzing the course readings in psychology and chemistry alongside student writing will pro- vide a clearer description of the reading students are doing, their major source of disciplinary language, and the writing they are producing, which we might expect to be quite different. Multidimensional anal- ysis has been chosen as the methodology because of the effectiveness of this method for demonstrating quantitatively how linguistic features of different registers tend to co-occur. Undergraduates, certainly in the two disciplines involved in this study, receive little explicit disciplinary writing instruction outside of their first CTW course. This course is typically taken in third year of the program, often in the second semester. As described in chapter 4, psychology students learn to write an APA research paper, some- thing rarely assigned outside Psyc 3530. In chemistry, students did not find the writing focus of Chem 4000 very helpful in learning to write for the discipline. Because students are not given much discipline- specific, explicit writing instruction or practice, it is important to look at what types of disciplinary writ- ing they are exposed to. The largest and most consistent form of disciplinary writing input comes from course readings. In psychology, textbooks are the primary source of discipline specific writing input. Stu- dents do read journal articles in Psyc 3530 and some other courses, but these articles are usually chosen by the students, and therefore difficult to assess as the articles are not the same. In chemistry, students are reading textbooks and laboratory manuals in equal proportions. Students read published articles, particularly in their research classes, but again they are different for each student.
The following four sections of this chapter will analyze the dimension scores for each corpus on each of the four dimensions, beginning with Dimension 1, comparing scores both across register and
discipline and looking more closely at how dimension-specific linguistic features are realized in each reg- ister. Excerpts are included to demonstrate the use of linguistic features for each dimension. The ex- cerpts have been coded with a tag denoting the discipline, course number, and text type. For example, an excerpt from the psychology 4020 textbook would be coded (P_4020_TB), while an example from the chemistry 3100 lab manual would have the code (C_3100_LM). Student writing is denoted with the final letters SW.