Effective Data Presentation in Chemistry
Kyle Bantz
Chemistry
College of Science & Engineering
Kyle Bantz is Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry. She teaches analytical chemistry courses, including Introductory Analytical Chemistry (CHEM 3101/3111) and Modern Instrumental Methods of Chemical Analysis lab (CHEM 4111), as well as General Chemistry I and II.
Kyle spoke to WAC Assistant Director Jessa Wood about her assignment. Her responses have been summarized below.
Please describe your assignment.
I call this assignment a “figure 4 report” because it requires a brief presentation of data with four sections:
- a professional-quality figure or table that has a well-written descriptive caption
- reporting of critical statistical data with correct significant figures and units that are outlined in the experimental procedure
- sources of systematic and/or random error, with an explanation of which was the largest and had the biggest effect on the results
- a short concluding statement.
Students complete a report in this format for multiple labs for Introductory Analytical Chemistry.
How does this assignment work in your class?
The typical lab assignment is a full lab report including an introduction, experimental procedures, results, discussion, conclusion, and references. But in this class, students don’t write a full lab report until the end of the semester, because having them write those long reports every week was not sustainable for students or TAs for a 2-credit lab. So they needed opportunities to practice writing each of those sections before they get to the final lab report.
In many weeks, they write a “core report”—just experimental results and discussions sections—instead of a lab report. But they also need practice with earlier sections so that when we get to that full lab report, they’re not writing introductions and experimentals for the first time—they’ve gotten feedback from TAs and from peers. So some weeks, they practice writing other sections like introductions, and I use this shorter assignment (the figure 4 report) as a way for them to still capture their experimental results without writing a longer core report.
Across the semester, the flow is that, one week, they will complete an experiment that requires an experimental section and a figure 4 report. They’ll have a week or two to turn this in. The next week is an experiment that they would write a longer core report on. And then the week after that, we don’t have lab, so they have extra time to spend writing or extra time to go see their TA to talk about what went well on this last report and how to translate that to the next experiment.
What learning does this assignment support?
In analytical chemistry, we study statistics and instrumentation. So, for this lab, I identified three learning outcomes that are most important for our labs: the communication of science through good figures and tables, including a good figure caption; statistical data analysis; and critically analyzing statistical outcomes.
Although this assignment was first designed to cover needed material more briefly than the core report assignment, it is also an opportunity for students to develop their science communication. Not all of my students are staying in academia. Some of them might be going into industry, and some might be going into roles in government. I tell them if you were writing this for your manager or for your supervisor, you need to let them know what you think the next steps would be next week, if you were continuing this process.
How have you developed and refined this assignment over time?
When I first took over the course back in 2017, we had 7 or 8 experiments throughout the entire semester, and every single one had a full lab report. But that’s a lot of feedback that the TAs are giving, and it's a lot of work for the students. And the problem was that by the time they were getting feedback, the students were already writing something else, so there wasn’t enough time for them to pause and actually reflect.
In a WAC meeting, we talked about boiling down what is most important in assignments. If I couldn’t have students write a lab report, what are the most important things to have students practice more than once? That’s when I narrowed the focus to the three goals above.
The first draft of this assignment was nowhere as organized and pretty as you see it now. It has been refined over a few years. Going to the Teaching with Writing Faculty Seminar was kind of what got it into this final form. I worked on really being explicit about what I wanted, helping students to know what they were practicing, what their audience needed to be, what the criteria were. Pamela Flash, who facilitated the workshop at the time, challenged us to identify, What are the unwritten rules? What are the things that you aren't saying? Is it clear? Working with other people who are not analytical chemists, are not in the chemistry department, brought up good questions—for example, what do you mean by “publishable quality”? That has to be explained or shown.
How have you navigated creating an assignment that TAs can successfully give feedback on and assess?
Yeah, the TA portion is always really interesting. In the assignment on Canvas, I have a SpeedGrader rubric, which lets the students see what the point breakdown looks like. This is something that the TAs have also really appreciated too. I try to give really clear guidelines in terms of grading, so you’re not splitting points, debating “is this a 3 or a 3.5?” Nope. You either click ‘they did it okay,’ or ‘they did it really well.’ This also means the TA grades are a little more consistent across sections.
I would say the one thing that is tricky with grading is the statistical analysis. A piece that I’ve had to add in is that, if we’re looking at their statistical analysis and it’s unclear or the numbers look really strange, the TA may reach back out to the student and ask for the lab notebook with values in it, and their Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet, to help them figure out where the student went wrong.
How has the assignment impacted students?
I think the students like it because it is a little bit of a break from having to do a lot of writing. But I still think that it allows them to think critically about the next steps in an experiment. In a perfect world, they would move on to taking the 4000-level analytical chemistry course with me, where they are working on more independently planning experiments. So this is a little bit of a testing ground for them.
I have definitely found that since we’ve been doing this, the figures and tables that students have been generating are getting a lot better—the overall quality is improving.
What We Like about Kyle’s Assignment
Iterative assignment: Repeating similar assignment formats multiple times in the semester reinforces key skills and allows students to continually apply feedback and improve their writing.
- Focused task: Kyle has worked to identify the most important learning goals for students in her assignment and honed the task to focus specifically on those outcomes. Students can easily understand how each component of the assignment contributes directly to their learning. Extraneous cognitive load from unnecessary steps is minimized.
- Compelling context: The assignment audience, form, and learning outcomes are explicitly connected to students' future goals, creating a meaningful rhetorical situation for students as they approach the assignment. This makes the assignment more interesting and motivating to students and supports career readiness.
- Curricular integration: Kyle's assignment is thoughtfully integrated in the broader arc of the chemistry curriculum. The skills supported by the assignment are outcomes in the chemistry department's writing plan, and Kyle has students practice specific skills--drawing conclusions and identifying next steps--they will need for the next analytical chemistry course in the curriculum.
- Thoughtful template: Used judiciously, templates can help scaffold assignments and minimize extraneous cognitive load for students, focusing their attention on the most important aspects of the task. Kyle's template provides only a basic structure, improving clarity while keeping students in charge of their own rhetorical decision-making. The example figure 4 report further illustrates expectations.
- Attention to audience: The assignment specifies an audience and provides sufficient information to enable students to tailor their writing choices to that audience. Importantly, speaking effectively to this audience is also a requirement of Kyle's rubric, ensuring effective communication is an integral part of success on this assignment.