 to hearing about it, so you can take it away, Amanda. All right, I'm gonna start with an overview of what we're doing before we do a little bit of a demonstration. Let me go ahead and share some slides and my computer is being difficult today. So I apologize if some of these slides don't load as quickly as I would like them to load. So we are developing and testing a scientific writing workshop series for undergraduate interns. This is part of the National Weather Center REU, but I think this curriculum could be used by other REU-like programs. So kind of an overview of what the program is. It is a workshop series in which we guide undergraduate students interns through the whole process of writing a scientific paper as well as the structure of that paper. And we try and make these workshops active. So students are going to be doing things like critical reading, evaluating papers and documents in groups, working together in peer review to help each other revise and edit their papers. There's lots of brainstorming which is what we're gonna see today. And we hope that when students come out of the program they have learned to apply scientific and ethical principles to their writing. So the motivation for this program was a lot of the research mentors expressed that their students were having difficulty with writing and that is a very hard thing that's a hard skill to build in a 10 week program where they're expected to submit a final paper by the end of the program. So mentors expressed that if the program could help them out getting their students up to speed with writing helping them feel more confident and capable that would be a very helpful thing. And students themselves expressed that when we had one-off writing or skill building workshops that they really enjoyed them and they were very helpful. So we're trying to put that together in a more structured way. We want to really especially help those students who come into the program with little or no background in scientific writing. This curriculum does not assume any prior experience with scientific writing. So we help them gain familiarity with the process. We space out our workshops not only to mirror the process of writing and the structure of a scientific paper but also to match with program level writing deadlines that we have for our students. So we help students pace out their writing over the summer. So it's not all happening at the end. And we would like to share this with other REU and REU-like programs. So we were inspired by the SOARS Scientific Communication Workshop. They have a syllabus that's available. And we were also inspired by the Iris Anti-Horrassment and Discrimination Workshop. And Daphne, one of the co-directors for the NWC-REU, she knew that I became interested in teaching scientific writing, hosting workshops as a grad student. When I was a grad student at OU, I worked in their writing center for quite a few years. And besides working one-on-one in students, with students, I would also do classroom visits. I would hold workshops for grad students undergrads visiting high schools. So she asked if I would be interested and here we are. So the two main goals for this curriculum are to help students who complete the series, successfully navigate that process of writing a print-ready scientific paper. And we want them to feel confident about what they've done. We want them to see themselves as scientific writers, no matter where they go with their careers. So there are a few learning objectives that the overall curriculum strives to attain. We want to not only describe the structure of a typical scientific paper, like introduction, literature review, methods, data, et cetera. We want to also explain the role, the unique and important role each part plays in that overall structure. We want our students to understand the importance of citing the literature. We want to give them strategies to help them write more efficiently, which is really helpful over a condensed summer program. We want to give them strategies to help them revise and edit their papers. We want them to have awareness, to build awareness about themselves as scientific writers in their own writing process. So we give them opportunities to reflect on that. We give them practice with critical reading of scientific papers that could be published articles, articles in review, papers that their fellow students and their cohort are writing. And we also help them get practice with peer review, both as the reviewer and as the reviewee. Wow, that's great. They love the peer review. I don't think we can do enough peer review. It's been a hit. And we hope that when students complete the series, they will be able to evaluate scientific papers. So determine if those papers are doing what they set out to do, if they're communicating what they set out to communicate. We want them to apply scientific and ethical principles to their own writing. We want them to be able to apply any techniques and strategies that we cover to their own writing. We want them to be able to take constructive feedback that comes from their mentors, from their teachers, from other students in the program and apply it to their own writing. We really do want them to be able to complete their paper, their final paper for our program by the end of the summer. And overall, we want them to understand how scientific writing is a really fundamental part of research. If you were to help us pilot this study, which I really hope some of you will consider that, some materials that the students taking part in the series will need is a copy of Eloquent Science, which this could be a paper copy. This could potentially be a digital copy that a library makes available. They will need to be able to type parts of their paper or have some sort of word processing capability. And if you are holding workshops in person, they may need to print paper copies of their drafts. Now, we have actually held this entire series virtually. The first year we held this series was 2021 and the entire program was virtual. So we can say all of the workshops can be done virtually and even though we came back to in-person last year, we still held some of the workshops virtually, even for the in-person workshops, there were some students who attended virtually. So it is possible to do this fully virtually, fully in-person or hybrid. For the instructors, if you are doing in-person workshops, you are going to want whiteboards, markers, things to mark up those whiteboards, tables for small group work, for a few of the workshops, so you will need to provide your own documents. This could be journal articles, drafts that you yourself have written, and you may need paper or digital copies of activities. So this is a rough timeline of how we, in the Weather Center REU, have distributed these workshops throughout the summer. So we have a 10-week program. So I'm using this timeline to show week one, week two, oops, week two, all the way through week 10. And this is roughly how we ordered our workshops. So there are eight workshops total in our series. Three of them are core workshops. They are longer. They can take up to about one and a half hours. Those are the introduction and literature review, discussion and conclusions, and revising and editing workshops. And then we have five shorter workshops, which we call supplemental workshops. These are typically less than an hour. We have brainstorming and outlining, citations and plagiarism, methods and results, titles and abstracts. And this order is a bit flexible, especially in the middle of the program. The workshops can be shifted around, depending on what's needed by a program. What we've done is typically start with the brainstorming and outlining workshop in week two. At that point, students are getting a handle on their summer research project. They typically have not done much writing. So we start out by helping them brainstorm. Just how could they start to generate ideas before they even start to write? Typically around week three or week four, we have the introduction and literature review workshop, which gets them a bit more into their writing. And as the program goes along and the students write more and more of their summer paper, we have them bring their papers more and more into our activities. And that does kind of culminate with the revising and editing workshop, which is mainly peer review. We pair up the students, we have them bring portions of their summer paper that they have concern about, and we give them guidelines for the best practices of peer review and we let them help each other. And that has been just a huge hit. So I'm not gonna go into the details of each workshop. I don't think that would probably work too well right now, but just to let you know, we have certain outcomes and matching activities that are driving each workshop. And that is something I could give more information about if you have questions or if you're interested in testing the curriculum with us. I'll just kind of move past these right now just to give you an idea of some of the outcomes we're hoping to achieve with each workshop and some of the activities that happened during them. And we'll be doing at least a bit of the brainstorming and outlining workshop today. So what we've learned by doing this series is that the students love peer review. We've actually ended up holding an additional peer review workshop, kind of an informal thing where we just pair up the students again and let them run through peer review again. We've learned that the more work we can have them do with their own papers, the better off they are. And that can be difficult sometimes because students don't necessarily write at the same pace. But we do try and get them working with their own papers as much as we can. The feedback has been really good, especially from the students who had no prior experience with scientific writing or were feeling unsure. They have expressed that they really appreciated learning what a scientific paper is, what it looks like and how to go about writing it. And even for the students who come into the program with experience, with confidence, they've still expressed that they've learned new things or they've brushed up on things they already knew and they still say that they benefit from the workshops. And again, these can be done virtually, in-person or hybrid. So here is kind of just some quotes I've pulled for some of our student surveys. We've taken surveys on this for two years and of the respondents, 83% of students who responded over those two years said over the course of their summer, their confidence in scientific writing increased and no one decreased. It was either increased or stays the same. And the workshops are something they cite as having contributed to that increase in confidence. So the workshops have helped some students understand what they need to do, what their paper should look like. Without the workshops, they may have not known what to even include in each section. Again, if they haven't written a scientific paper before or even read one, seeing something like an abstract, what does that even mean? What goes in there? So I really like to know that for some of them, it helped the process seem more manageable. They come out of the program feeling like they have a more solid understanding. I love the quotes we've gotten. So I'm just including more in here for some the workshops were crucial to their success. So I'm really happy that the students appear to have benefited from these workshops. And I didn't pull as many quotes from our mentors, but again, writing has been a concern that some mentors have expressed that their students come into the program and they don't have experience with writing and it's difficult for them to build that experience. Something we did want to do with this program is take some of that responsibility off of individual mentors to teach their students how to write and instead, standardize that at the program level. So that has made mentoring easier and we have been cited as a tool that helped their students succeed. And I'm just gonna mention this last quote, sites writing coaches, which is sort of another prong of what we're doing with this program. So we have our scientific writing workshop series. We also last year started a writing coach program where we draw volunteer coaches from faculty, research scientists, postdocs, graduate students who are interested in serving students in the program. They volunteer as writing coaches. We pair them with individual students who request a coach. We train our coaches in the expectations for them and for their students. We train them in skills they're gonna use during meetings, such as active listening and reflective questioning. We walk them through what a typical coaching session might look like. Goal setting is a big part of coaching. So we help them learn how to set goals and hold their students accountable. And we provide them with materials to help them coach their students as well. And I'll just put this up here before we go into our demo. We are looking to keep refining the workshop series as well as the writing coach program. And part of that is recruiting pilot sites to help us test the program starting in this upcoming summer and help us refine the curricula for both of those programs, the workshop series and the writing coaches. And eventually we do plan to share this out with our reU's and similar programs. And if you're interested in learning more or in piloting, this is my email address that is not correct in the flyer. So it has two Ks, a-k-kiss at o-u-dot-e-d-u. So that's where you can reach me. Well, Tara, definitely feel free to contact me at the a-k-kiss and I'd love to chat. All right. Ooh, so that's our rundown. All right, before I do a bit of a demo and it's gonna be kind of a meta demo, you'll see why as we get going. Are there any questions right now? So I may have missed this, but if we are not able to participate in every workshop or every piece of the curriculum, would you still be interested in folks who could maybe just do one or two pieces and provide feedback? I'm interested. Alex, Daphne, would you have any comment on that? I don't see a problem with that. I think any feedback on the curriculum itself would be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, and I'd love to know which workshops you might be interested in. So maybe that's something we could chat about later. So I'm interested for the postdocs, actually. Like the strategies of writing efficiently is one of the few things I'd be like, because that's a big job for them. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think there's a lot of application. I don't think it just has to even be REU-like programs. I think there could be a lot of use. Yeah, and I imagine it's really empowering for the students that they may not like it at the time. Not right, but then next year they'll be thinking, wow, it's so much easier to go through like to write these papers or reports. How easily do you feel like it could be adapted for like scientific posters and oral presentations? I definitely think it could because the posters are going to have a lot of the same information just maybe less verbose than a paper. I think we definitely wanna talk back and forth about exactly what you're looking for with help for posters and how we could straight up use or modify what we have. I think a lot of the information very much applies. Okay. Oh, yes. Yes, Daphne just sent a chat about eloquent science and how that started for our program. All right, so we are not going to be able to do the full brainstorming and outlining workshop. There are parts of it that are specific to student writers and if we were holding this during a program, we would actually give the students a little bit of homework to do in advance. We would give them a reading from eloquent science to do in advance. We hold this workshop virtually. So that's gonna be very similar to what we're doing today. Typically we would send the students the link to the virtual whiteboard in advance so they could get used to navigating before the workshop. So we're not gonna do that today. We're gonna kind of talk through some of this. Oh, what was, okay. I am gonna go ahead. Actually, before I send the link to our shared virtual whiteboard, I'm gonna show you what's gonna happen first when you click on that link. So we are going to be doing a bit of the brainstorming workshop using a shared whiteboard through Miro. Miro is what we've landed on for our virtual whiteboard of choice and it has a free option for educators which we've been able to take advantage of. So in a minute, I am going to send you a link to this virtual whiteboard. When you click on that link, you are going to see a prompt, the prompt I'm showing on my screen that says, introduce yourself on a board. Now, you can put your name if you'd like. So if you want your cursor to say your name, you can put your name. You can also leave this blank and hit continue and it'll let you join anonymously. So up to you if you want to put your name or not. And then it says, enter your email if you want to make your own board later. I would suggest you leave that blank. Do not agree to receive marketing or promotional emails. Just go ahead and click enter board now. So that's what's gonna happen when I share the link. So don't feel the need to put your name if you don't want and don't feel the need to put your email unless you want to be contacted. Before I send the link, I am actually going to flip over to a new set of slides. I think I'm sharing the correct, yeah. Yeah, I'm sharing the correct thing. So if we were to actually be holding this brainstorming and outlining workshop with students, there would be some differences. So several days prior to the workshop, I would contact my students and I would ask them to read chapter six of eloquent science and that is the chapter on brainstorming and outlining. It's a few pages long. So by giving it to the students several days in advance, that does give them time to prepare for the workshop. Several days in advance, I would also send them the link to the virtual whiteboard that I'm about to send to you all in the chat. I've made a sandbox on that whiteboard and I would ask students to practice navigating around the whiteboard, moving around, scrolling in, scrolling out and annotating it. And at that time that I send the link, I would also let students know about the etiquette we're expecting from them in the workshop. So things like staying muted while you're not speaking, having an appropriate background, trying to limit distraction and noise, trying to have headphones if possible. We would tell them about those expectations in advance. So not something we can do today, but that's what we do in real time. And then one day before the workshop, which again is not happening today, there are going to be two brainstorming prompts in this workshop and the instructor would send those prompts to the students in advance with a little bit of clarification to get the students ready for the workshop and thinking ahead. For us today, you're just gonna see the prompts in real time, so no advance reflection. Okay, so what we would do when holding this workshop is we would start out by acknowledging that the students are going to be writing a print ready scientific paper in a 10 week summer program. And that's quite an excursion, that is going to be something that takes a lot of work and it's something that they're going to want to start working on as soon as possible. So we start off the series with a brainstorming workshop because brainstorming is a strategy to increase their writing efficiency and make that writing process seem less burdensome. So brainstorming, it's any process or activity that leads to spontaneous, semi-random idea generation. So we're looking for ideas to pop up into our heads. Now, it's only semi-random because we do want to have some focus. We don't want to just let our minds range completely freely. We do want to focus that idea generation with some sort of prompt like we're gonna do today or some sort of nutshell, which in the case of a summer paper could be a topic statement or a purpose statement that describes their research project that they'll be writing about. So the goal of brainstorming is to stay focused on this prompt, but let the mind run wild. Think widely, think creatively, keep thinking, even after you think all your ideas have been generated. Keep going, keep pushing, aim to create a quantity of ideas. Don't worry if they're quote unquote good or bad ideas, aim for quantity, not quality. So we are going to actually do some brainstorming. We're gonna start with the first brainstorming prompt that we would use for this workshop, which is how do you start to write? Now as you're reflecting on that prompt, how do you start to write? You can think back to techniques or processes that you use when you need to start a new writing project, or you can think back to a time when the writing really flowed. You were in the zone, you were writing a paper, the words were just flying onto the screen, everything felt really good. Think back to that time and consider why the writing flowed so easily. In contrast, you could think back to a time when you just couldn't get words on paper. You were just having writer's block, you could not move forward. Think back to that time and consider what did you do to push through that and finally start to write. Now while you are thinking about that prompt, I am going to drop that link to that Miro whiteboard into the chat. So if you would like to join us on the whiteboard, you can click on that link. Again, you do not need to put your name, you do not need to put your email, feel free to skip through those. I am going to share my screen so you can see what it looks like as people start to join that whiteboard and I can see we've already got participants. So what I'm going to do is pull you over to me. So what I would typically create prior to this workshop is a sandbox area where students could get practice using the tools on the left sidebar to post their ideas. So the tool I like the most is this sticky note. It's three below the select arrow. So yep, you're already finding the sticky note. If you click on that sticky note, you can choose a color, you can put it onto the screen and you can start to type. I'll give you a few seconds to mess around with that. If you are on a touchpad, it is a two finger swipe. If you're on a mouse, I believe you can use a scroll. There are zoom options in the lower right hand corner, the plus sign and the minus sign. And you can also use the keyboard keys to shift around the screen. So once again, I'm going to pull everyone to me just to make sure we're finding the sandbox. Okay, looks like we're doing good. So what I'm going to do is scroll down and I'm going to pull you all to me. And here is a whiteboard for our first prompt. So what I would like you to do is think about all the ideas you can possibly come up with about how you start to write. You can use those sticky notes to put your ideas onto the screen. You can read other people's sticky notes as they put them on the screen. You can build off of them. And I am going to use the timer feature. And I think I'll just give us two minutes to put these sticky notes onto the screen. And you can play music. I'm gonna not play music today, but you could play a nice little jingle if you want to. And there is no need to stop with one sticky note. I would encourage you to generate as many ideas as you can in the remaining about one minute we have left. So think about when writing went well, when writing didn't go so well, think about the techniques you already know that work well for you and share them on the board. All right. So if you have any other ideas you are looking to write down, I'm not gonna stop you while I'm talking. And normally we might have a few more people in the workshop than this. So we might have a board that is completely filled up with notes. What we would do at this point is I would invite the students to start to move around and categorize the ideas that have them put on the board. So let's see. For example, I'm seeing a few sticky notes that talk about using an outline to help yourself begin to write. So I might invite the students to use some of the shapes on the board to categorize the different types of sticky note. Ideas that they're seeing. Let's see. I see a sticky note that is talking about figures. I see a sticky note about stream of consciousness writing. So potentially free writing. Let's see, we have another sticky note about the figures. We have a sticky note about how when the deadline is approaching, that is good motivation to start to write. So with a bigger group, I would ask the students to start to categorize and to actually outline, in that way start to outline some of the ideas that have been generated. And I would also ask them to comment on anything they see. So if anything stands out to them or if they have a question about any of the ideas they could unmute or drop what they would like to say into the chat. So I'll ask you all, is there anything you're seeing here that really stands out to you? Maybe something you haven't thought of before or something that you think works really well? Yeah, I'll give you a second to read. Starting with figures is really nice, especially for science writing. But sometimes when you don't have them yet we still have to write something. They're like, well, then where do I start? Yeah, do you have an answer for that? Cause the, yeah, the students taking this workshop, they probably don't have any figures. Would you have any advice for them? I would say then you should start with the beginning really. Start with your introduction. You're doing a lot of research to figure out why you're doing the research that you're gonna be doing. You're doing background information. Do a little summary of that. Okay, so summarize. Oh gosh, why is that so tiny? Let's make that a little bit bigger. Ooh, that's a bit big. Summarize your background and introduction. Okay, so we can add that on there. Does anyone else see anything that stands out to them? I like the point about consider my goals, objectives, when I'm trying to achieve, and I thought, oh, there's that. That's a good point. I like the one about I jot down whatever I'm thinking about for an afternoon. So when I think of the afternoon, I think kind of nice warm lighting, nice part of the day. Is there anything, any sort of ritual that anyone has that helps them start to write that you'd like to share? My ritual is getting some coffee in the morning and sitting down with my cats. Is there anything that helps anyone else start to write? Tea and dogs. Tea and dogs, okay. So kind of a contrast to coffee and cats, maybe a compliment. All right, so when we've done this workshop in the past with the students, we have had the sticky notes just extend off of the whiteboard. They have been really, really into this and it's really fun to see them discover new tactics that they haven't done before or haven't thought of. Now, I don't think we're gonna have time today, but what I do next is I follow it up with a different type of prompt. And this is to get the students thinking early about what their scientific paper is going to look like. So let me bring everyone to me. I don't think we'll go through this prompt right now, but I would ask them to think about what makes scientific writing different from other types of academic writing. So I would prompt them to contrast a scientific paper with a narrative or with a poem because they may have more experience writing other types of academic papers, such as in a composition class. They might have written descriptive essays, persuasive essays before, discourse essays, but they may not have written scientifically before. So we want them to think about how is that going to be different? And I think we won't do that right now for the sake of time, but just to skip back to my slides. After getting through those two prompts, we would do a bit of a discussion about outlining. So we would define outlining as giving some sort of structure to all those generated ideas that came from brainstorming. This is when they can look at each of those ideas, they can evaluate them, they can keep the ones that are gonna work for their paper, they can maybe put the other ones in a new document to save for later on. They can visually start to give that brainstormed content some sort of structure. And what we do at this point is we briefly introduce what a typical scientific paper might look like. And this might be the first time they've ever heard of these different sections. So we do a brief rundown of some of the typical sections of a scientific paper. We go through briefly what an introduction is, what a literature review is, what conclusions are. And we talk about how that could be one way to start organizing generated ideas and building the structure of their eventual paper. And then at the end of, oh, we are not, I was not planning to do this today, but to get the students thinking about their summer research, we do a nutshell activity where they draft a sentence describing the topic or the purpose of their summer paper. And then they get in breakout rooms or small tables of three to four people. They take turns reading their nutshell to the group. And the other members of their group ask them questions about their nutshell. They ask clarifying questions. And this is really just a short activity to get the students focused on their summer topic and talking to each other because this might be one of the first times the cohort is interacting with each other. Thank you. All right. We've got a question about the outlining. I mean, especially if you're doing that kind of at the beginning of the summer, how do you, like I don't know that I would know, just starting research, I don't know that I would know what to put under results and description and conclusions. Yeah. So this is a very, very brief introduction. We might say the introduction is where you tell readers about the purpose of your study. The literature review is where you talk about other studies that have come before and what you've learned from them. The results are where you will put many of your figures. You'll write up the results of your experiments, your simulations, your interviews. We would very, very briefly run through them because in the next workshop, the introduction and literature review workshop, which is a much longer workshop, it's up to an hour and a half. That's where we really start breaking these sections down. So this is very much just a brief, here is what the paper might look like. Here's a very quick idea of what each section might hold. Keep it in mind. You might wanna use it later on for your outlining. This is pretty brief. Okay, thanks. And then if time allows, I'm gonna do a quick skip ahead because I know we're near the end. I do like to have some reflection if possible at the end of each workshop. So I would ask the students, what did you learn today? That was new to you. What didn't you know that you now know? And also I would ask them, how could you apply what you learned today to your summer research paper? We'll usually have some people talk about using some of the brainstorming methods for their paper. We'll talk about them using the nutshell and then we'll wrap up. So there's a very kind of meta brief overview of what we might do in that workshop, but hopefully that gives you an idea. And that would be the first workshop of the series.