Long before she took on the position of Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Cornelia Lang, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was thinking about how the University of Iowa could better prepare students to make connections across the disciplines. Inspired by the successful UCLA Cluster Program, she pioneered a novel approach to undergraduate general education at Iowa, interdisciplinary, team-taught courses organized around one “big idea.” The purpose of Big Ideas courses is to demonstrate for students that big questions – like how societies create and use information, or the role of creativity in our lives – are best explored from multiple perspectives and with many different kinds of expertise. Understanding the origins of the universe, for example, the subject of the first UI Big Ideas course, requires the study not only of astronomy, Lang’s own field, but of physics, biology, anthropology and environmental science. In addition to modeling an interdisciplinary form of inquiry through discussions with each other in front of students, professors teaching Big Ideas courses use inquiry-based and student-centered approaches to learning, with flipped classrooms and active learning activities. 

But it quickly became clear to Lang that it wasn’t enough for students to simply listen to professors from different departments describe their approaches to course topics or watch them bounce ideas off each other. “We initially thought that students would see us engage with each other and make connections (between the disciplines and to course content), but what we realized is that they didn’t necessarily do this on their own.” Lang decided that they had to be much more explicit in asking students to reflect in writing on what they were learning. “The more we taught this class, the more we realized how critical it is for students to have to write about their own reflections on the connections they are making as they learn.” This led to writing assignments that guided students through the process of considering the different perspectives that each of the disciplines contributed to their understanding of course topics like the evolution of cells, or the potential for life on other planets. 

Lang’s understanding of the importance of writing to learn – and to learning scientific concepts specifically – began in high school with a great math teacher and an unforgettable assignment. “One of the most memorable experiences of my high school education, which was at a northern North Dakota public school, was a math class. The teacher, who was teaching us either precalculus or calculus, asked us to write a lot. One essay he gave us was to explain the difference between a derivative and an integral. That left a really big impression on me. I had to explain in words something that would otherwise be in symbolic notation.” Asking students to explain something in writing is not only an effective way to help them think through and consolidate their understanding of important concepts, it is also a way to help them to identify gaps in their knowledge. It’s a lesson that stuck with Lang. “I’ve carried this with me always, that it is totally appropriate in the sciences to take the time to write something out, to explain it, in regular sentences. It’s a strategy I’ve used in all my teaching, asking students to get together and explain things to each other in words, rather than just sit and do calculations on a page.”

In her Origins of the Universe course, Lang and her team use short, informal, in-class assignments that ask students to explain key concepts, like the difference between RNA and DNA, in just a few sentences, as well as one-minute and five-minute papers that ask students to describe what they have learned so far in the class or what is still unclear to them. These shorter, less formal writing assignments build to a culminating project in which students write a reflective essay about a topic from the course that inspired them and talk about the perspective that the three disciplines brought to their understanding of this topic. The shorter assignments, in other words, function as a kind of scaffolding for the bigger projects. “The things students do in class or for homework are the same kind of things we ask them to do in their big assessments. We felt it would be unfair to ask students to write several paragraphs on their midterm if they hadn’t practiced writing in other places.” Students are also provided with examples or models of the kind of writing they’re being asked to do, a scaffolding step that is often missing in college courses.

But while there’s now an enormous literature on writing-to-learn in the sciences, the kind of reflective writing that Lang includes in her course is still relatively rare. It’s often seen as too subjective for a science classroom. “There’s a sense that personal reflection doesn’t belong in science because science is about the facts and the data,” Lang told me. “I think instructors are sometimes a little timid about including a personal reflection assignment because they think it’s too much like an opinion.” But Lang’s years of experience and careful study of pedagogy has taught her otherwise. Reflective writing is a metacognitive strategy that promotes student learning by focusing students’ attention not just on what they are learning but on how they are learning it. “With the right scaffolding, students have to tie what they learn in the class to something they are interested in and then to the different disciplines. So, it becomes less an opinion and more like ‘this is a connection I made in my brain and I want to show you how that works.’” 

Lang also emphasizes the importance of helping students to connect course content to their own lives. “More and more we hear from students, especially since the pandemic, that they want to know why the course is relevant to them.” Research has shown that when the purpose of a course and its assignments are made explicit through clear descriptions of their relationships to student lives, future careers and ability to succeed, students do better. It also helps boost student confidence and retention rates, and reduce inequities (Winkelmes, 2015; TILT Higher Ed). As Lang points out, “Asking students to reflect on what they are learning is one of the simplest and most effective ways to help them understand its relevance.” One of her favorite assignments is to ask students at the very beginning of a course to describe their previous experiences with astronomy. “You get amazing responses, like the student who describes falling in love with her boyfriend as they lay in a field making up names for the constellations they saw in the sky, or the students who talk about visiting a planetarium when they were five.” This kind of early informal writing is invaluable for a number of reasons. Not only does it get students thinking, from the outset, about the ways in which the course relates to their own experiences, it allows the instructor to identify and address misconceptions that might inhibit student learning. It also gives the instructor a sense of each student’s writing skills, allowing for early intervention in cases where a student is really struggling and a baseline reference that can be used to detect, or better still, to deter plagiarism.

Lang is passionate about helping students make these connections, and about situating science in the context of the society in which we live. Great scientists, she argues, draw clear lines between the work that scientists do in labs and its actual and potential applications in the real world. She’s also cognizant of the effects of misrepresentations of science. Another pivotal moment in her education came when she was assigned as a graduate student to work with a professor to design a course called Astronomy and the Media. The purpose of the course was to analyze how astronomy is portrayed in in the media and teach students to appreciate the difference between, for example, a NASA documentary and a movie representation of space, or an article in the New York Times and one in Space.com. “I loved that course and so I’ve always asked my students to be observant of how astronomy is portrayed in writing and in the media.” She has dedicated much of her own career to public outreach, supporting public events featuring scientists and giving public talks about astronomy to community groups.  She also asks students to think about their audiences. Even when working with graduate students whose work is often highly technical, Lang emphasizes the importance of getting feedback from their peers and writing for as wide an audience as possible. “The writing needs to be specific and technical, but it should not be incomprehensible to someone else in the field of astronomy. It’s even better if other science students - biology students or chemistry students - can at least get the gist and understand the introduction and the thesis.”

Despite the benefits, Lang recognizes the challenges of including more writing in science courses. “Scientists feel a lot of pressure to cover content. If you’re teaching an engineering course, it can feel very difficult as an instructor to take the time to ask students to write. A lot of science courses are really large, with up to four hundred students. If you assign writing in a class that big, who’s going to read and grade it?” There’s also the problem of convincing students that reflective writing in particular is a worthwhile use of their time. Many of them have never been asked do this kind of writing in an upper-level science class.” But Lang thinks it’s worth it. “Even a one-minute paper or a five-minute paper in class can help students make a connection between their own lives and what they are learning.” Short reflections on the readings or concepts can give students a starting point for in-class discussions. Assignments that ask students to describe in a few sentences something surprising they have learned encourage student to reflect on their own learning process.

When asked about her own writing process, Lang explains that she likes to sketch things out visually. “When I prepare a scientific talk, I use the PowerPoint slides like a storyboard and I put them all in front of me so that I can see where I’m going and what I’m doing at the beginning, the middle and the end. I rarely sit down with a blank Word file; I map out an outline of what I want to do in the space I have. And that’s how I approach a scientific paper too. I map it out visually in a drawing format.” Space is something in even shorter supply than usual in her job as Associate Dean. “I had no idea there would be so much writing involved in this job,” Lang laughs, “and it’s more writing in a confined space – a page or two or just a few paragraphs – than I’ve been used to, even as a scientist.” She writes a lot of emails, of course, but also countless reports, policies, and memos. It’s a different style than Lang uses in her scientific work, but she takes these communications very seriously. “I really hope that people read these memos and policies because I include a lot of advice and best practices about teaching.” Her responsibilities as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education have reinforced for her the importance of teaching students how to communicate effectively across different writing styles and genres. It’s a message she hopes will be embraced by more faculty. “I think it’s really important that we initiate conversations in the disciplines about how we can give students more opportunities to develop their writing skills.” This is a sentiment that those of us who teach writing can enthusiastically endorse.