What Can We Learn about WID from Exceptionally High-Achieving STEM Majors?

Abstract

: This study reports on how a cohort of 16 especially accomplished undergraduate STEM majors narrate their literacy histories, experience learning to write in the sciences during their college years, and reflect on their priorities for writing more generally. These participants report largely positive early schooling experiences with writing; attribute progress in learning scientific writing during their college years more to the social networks of their undergraduate research labs than to traditional writing-intensive courses; associate “writing” more with personal agency than with assimilation to a disciplinary discourse community; assign more meaning to writing that is personal, narrative, public, and/or novel than technical; and believe that writing should serve multiple purposes, at once within and beyond their home STEM disciplines. Some of these findings disrupt the novice-to-expert assumptions of WID theory and suggest a latent demand for writing courses that depart from traditional technical communication and writing-in-the-major offerings. our highest performing STEM undergraduates negotiate their writing lives. This study opens that line of inquiry by focusing on a small and especially accomplished group of undergraduate STEM majors. These students are exemplars of emerging expertise who have apprenticed themselves to their chosen fields through stellar academic performance, sustained undergraduate research, aspirations to pursue advanced study in top graduate programs and medical schools, and successful disciplinary writing as manifest in honors theses and engineering design projects. Some are even co-authors on peer-reviewed articles