STEMM Student Writing Center Usage at a Health Sciences University

Alison O’Keefe
Augusta University
alison.e.okeefe@gmail.com

Candis Bond¹
Augusta University
cbond@augusta.edu

Abstract
Writing is central to the academic and professional success of STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine) students, yet there is little writing center scholarship examining how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. This article presents quantitative findings from a mix-methods survey study examining STEMM undergraduate students’ usage of university writing centers. The study was conducted at a mid-sized, public health sciences research university in the Southeast. Findings from the survey suggest that STEMM students are likely to visit writing centers, but their visits overwhelmingly focus on coursework in the core curriculum rather than coursework within their majors. These students tend to view disciplinary writing as formulaic and content-driven, which affects writing center usage. They also express concerns about the ability of writing center staff to assist with scientific and technical genres. Throughout the presentation of results, the authors offer insight into practices they plan to implement to provide better outreach and support to STEMM students at their university. While study results are not generalizable to other institutions, they still provide insight into usage behaviors of STEMM students that can be useful to a variety of institutions as they work to support STEMM writers.

Augusta University is known as Georgia’s Health Sciences University, so it is not surprising that the majority of its approximately 5,000 undergraduates major in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) disciplines. When I (AO), an English major, began working as an undergraduate writing consultant in the Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence, I was excited, if a bit intimidated, to work with these students. I expected to see lab reports, scientific research proposals, and research posters. I was looking forward to growing my expertise in scientific style and genres. However, I was surprised that scientific genres were a rare sighting in our writing center. I wondered why we didn’t see more scientific writing. Similarly, when I (CB) began my position as director of the writing center at Augusta University, I expected to see a deluge of STEMM students coming through the door seeking assistance with disciplinary writing assignments. Augusta University does not have a WAC/WID program—the writing center is the primary support for writers across and in the disciplines—and I had heard there was great demand for scientific and technical writing support. Consequently, I set to work further developing my expertise in this area and familiarized myself with common STEMM genres. I modified our consultant training program to focus more on rhetorical genre analysis and scientific style so that our undergraduate staff, who often major in the humanities and social sciences, would feel prepared to work with STEMM students. But then something odd happened: we rarely saw STEMM writing. This raised many questions: Was this writing not being assigned? Was it being assigned but students were not coming to the writing center for support? If the latter, why? Were they going someplace else? Did they perceive the writing center to be a non-STEMM space? What, exactly, was going on?

As we talked about this phenomenon together, we wondered if writing centers at other institutions with high STEMM enrollments had noticed similar trends, and if so, what they had done to better support STEMM students writing within their majors. After reviewing writing center scholarship, we realized that, although studies on undergraduate student usage exist (Colton; Salem; Savarese), none focus specifically on STEMM students. Since writing centers aim to serve all students and the number of STEMM majors enrolled in United States higher education institutions continues to increase (National Science Foundation National Science Board), we felt it was important to learn more about this population’s usage and perceptions of writing centers. We developed the following research questions to guide our mixed-methods survey study:

Do undergraduate STEMM students use the writing center at rates comparable to non-STEMM students? Are there differences in the usage rates and perceptions by STEMM major?
When STEMM students do use writing centers, how do they use them? Do they use writing centers for core requirements? For major requirements? For both? What kinds of assignments do they bring to writing centers, and do they trust writing center staff to assist them?
When STEMM students do not use writing centers for disciplinary writing tasks, what is their rationale?

Our findings showed that STEMM students, especially those with minoritized backgrounds, were more likely to use the writing center than non-STEMM majors at our institution, but the majority of these students sought assistance with writing assigned in the core curriculum rather than writing assigned in their majors. Survey data suggests this is related to a lack of writing being assigned in STEMM programs as well as students’ perceptions that STEMM genres are formulaic, content-driven, and do not qualify as “writing.” STEMM students were also ambivalent about the ability of writing center staff with non-STEMM backgrounds to help them with disciplinary writing tasks.

Taken together, our results have challenged us to rethink our approach to branding and outreach. They have also provided data to support the need for WAC/WID programming at our institution, including more professional development opportunities for STEMM faculty who want to learn how to integrate writing into their courses. Although our study is limited to one university and our findings cannot be generalized to other institutions, we hope writing center practitioners can use our data to gain insight into STEMM students’ use of writing centers in order to improve their support for this student population. We also hope other institutions will consider replicating our study, or others like it, within their own institutional contexts.

The Importance of Supporting STEMM Writers in the Writing Center

Learning more about STEMM students and writing centers is important if writing centers want to support the next generation of scientists and health professionals. Over the past several decades, the US education system has placed increasing emphasis on STEM and health sciences education, and undergraduate and graduate students are declaring STEM and health science majors at increasing rates. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of US higher education degrees awarded to STEM majors nearly doubled, increasing from approximately 560,000 to more than one million (National Science Foundation National Science Board). Although the number of higher education degrees awarded to non-STEM majors also increased during this period, growth in STEM notably outpaced that of other disciplines. Similarly, health science degrees awarded showed a 98% increase between 2010 and 2020 (Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics). In 2019, the US labor market reported that over 36 million people, or approximately 23% of the total workforce, required STEM expertise for their jobs. This number is higher if health sciences are included, and it is expected to increase within the next decade (National Science Foundation National Science Board). Writing centers can play a pivotal role in the development of these students’ communication skills and writing expertise.

In addition to content knowledge and lab and clinical skills, the ability to write clearly for a variety of audiences is critical to STEMM students’ future professional success. In Lisa Emerson’s book-length study of more than 100 faculty scientists’ perceptions of writing, one interviewee—an established physicist—went so far as to claim, “The fundamental discriminator between those who are successful in science and professionally is their ability to write” (Forgotten Tribe 59). The foundational studies and chapters included in Michael J. Madson’s book Teaching Writing in the Health Professions present a similar argument for the health sciences. As Madson writes in his introduction, writing is “prominent” in the health sciences: “health professionals need to learn a variety of written genres while in the classroom or on the job—and often produce them under tight constraints” (Madson 1). Because learning disciplinary genres, rhetorical moves, and stylistic conventions is part of learning to write science, writing center practitioners are beginning to recognizing the need to train staff in STEMM genre and rhetorical knowledge (Madson; Shome; Siemann; Walker). However, training staff may not be enough if STEMM students are not assigned writing or do not view the writing center as a viable support option. It also matters what kinds of writing STEMM students are assigned by faculty and how they are taught to perceive the role of writing in their respective fields.

In his national study on writing assignments across the curriculum, Dan Melzer examined 2,101 assignments from 400 courses offered at US higher education institutions, 100 of which were in the natural and applied sciences, and found that undergraduates were most frequently assigned informative writing tasks intended for an “audience of teacher-as-examiner” (22-3, 28). Only 17% of writing assignments asked students to consider the exploratory or rhetorical dimensions of writing by addressing texts to the self, peers, or wider audiences (Melzer 22-3, 28). Students were rarely assigned writing-to-learn activities or asked to consider writing as central to their identities as researchers and communicators (Melzer 22-3, 24-5). While this is detrimental to all students’ growth, it can be especially limiting for scientists, whose careers depend upon the ability to push the limits of knowledge through creative thinking and address varied audiences. Scientists need opportunities to develop as rhetorical agents and can benefit immensely from training in using writing as a means of learning—of knowing and doing in their disciplines, to use Michael Carter’s terms. Several scholars have noted the importance of writing to learn in the sciences. For example, M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin argued that language and writing are imperative for constructing, not just reporting, scientific knowledge. In Emerson’s more recent study, several scientists mentioned the role of writing within their scientific process, noting the importance of writing to make new discoveries and connections. For example, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology stated:

I think writing is part of science. It’s not just there to communicate—of course it is there to communicate what you’ve done—but… there’s an element of discovery to the writing as well…you make connections between findings or the data that you’ve collected, the interpretation of that, and the work other people have done. I think only through writing do you make those discoveries and connections. (Forgotten Tribe 136)

Although writing is important in science, the teaching of scientific and technical communication is not always integrated into STEMM curricula, even with the growth of WAC/WID programs over the last several decades.² Since the early 2000s, several WAC/WID and STEMM studies have tested curricular interventions for improving students’ scientific writing skills,³ and WAC/WID programs have added writing requirements into many STEMM curricula. Despite these initiatives, STEMM students still do not always get explicit instruction in scientific and technical communication, and many scientists claim they did not gain writing confidence as writers until after graduate school (Emerson Forgotten Tribe). Research suggests this is because some STEMM faculty do not feel equipped to teach writing, some feel writing instruction is not their responsibility, and still others feel pressured to subordinate writing instruction to get through course content.⁴

Thus, it is not surprising that many undergraduate STEMM students fail to see how writing is central to their careers, and students and faculty alike may not identify as writers (Emerson “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Poe et al.; Siemann). Emerson notes this paradox in the conclusion to her study. In response to the question of whether scientists identified as “writers,”

mostly the answer came back, in some form, “no, I’m just a scientist.” Over and over, I noted this odd discrepancy: scientists were concerned about their students’ writing, the majority saw themselves as (sometimes reluctant) teachers of writing, but many hadn’t recognized the extent to which their professional identity revolved around their writing, until they began to talk about it. Only a few, acknowledging their professional identity as inextricably tied to writing, made writing central to their work with the next generation of scientists. (Forgotten Tribe 180)

While Emerson’s conclusion may seem disheartening, she suggests STEM faculty have seen the value of writing as part of their professional identity when “they began to talk about it.” Similarly, in their study of STEM faculty conceptions of writing and how it impacts undergraduate teaching, Moon et al. found STEM faculty and students often do not get chances to think about writing as central to science, but when they do, they are more likely to embrace a writing identity. As sites that encourage talking about writing, writing centers have great potential to help STEMM writers develop their writing identities. Writing centers, either on their own or in partnership with WAC/WID programs, can also be sites for faculty to have these conversations and receive training they need to integrate writing more fully into the curriculum.

In her chapter on tutoring STEM majors, Catherine Siemann aptly notes that “as STEM programs move ever further to the forefront of higher education, writing centers are not immune to the effects of shifting student populations and curricular emphasis” and may need to make changes to accommodate the “sometimes complicated tutoring situations that are typical of STEM programs and STEM students” (111), an idea Rachel Shome takes up in her recent article on training writing center tutors to work effectively with STEMM writers. We agree that writing centers must be responsive to STEMM writers and meet them where they are, but we feel that in order to do this well, more research is needed about how these students perceive and use writing centers. Most writing center scholarship on working with STEMM students focuses on developing specific interventions, such as boot camps, workshops, embedded consultant programs, and writing groups (Blake; Blake et al.; Bond; Hambrick and Giaimo; Rollins et al.) or developing staff training (Shome; Siemann). Very little scholarship examines how STEMM students perceive writing centers, what motivates them to visit the writing center, and what kinds of tasks they tend to work on if they do visit the writing center. We hope our study can contribute new insight into connections between undergraduate STEMM students and writing centers.

Methods: A Mixed-Methods Survey Study

To learn more about undergraduate STEMM students’ perceptions and uses of writing centers, we designed and distributed an anonymous, web-based, mixed-methods survey to Augusta University undergraduates aged 18 or older with a declared STEMM major.⁵ We obtained a list of all declared undergraduate STEMM majors from college deans and sent an email invitation to take the survey to all 2,947 students on the lists. Our Qualtrics survey contained 38 quantitative questions and two open-ended, free-response questions. We received 409 responses. After eliminating the responses of participants who did not complete at least 33% of the survey, we had a final total sample of 377 students. Table 1 provides a breakdown of the sample by STEMM major.

In order to parse results for meaning, it is important to know if the sample is representative. Universities that replicate our methods can look at respondents overall, but also respondents by major, in order to see if results are representative of STEMM enrollments across and within disciplines and whether trends exist by major. We found that our sample was representative of STEMM majors at Augusta University. As Table 1 shows, the most commonly selected majors were kinesiology, psychology, biology, and cell and molecular biology. These reflect some of the most common majors among STEMM undergraduates at our institution. Although only 13% of STEMM majors responded to the survey, the percentage of respondents by major was similar enough to STEMM major enrollments by discipline (+/- 5%) to suggest results are representative of STEMM majors’ views and behaviors. Students from all ranks participated (freshmen (n=72, 19.1%), sophomores (n=65, 17.2%), juniors (105, 27.9%), and seniors (135, 35.8%)). The majority of respondents were between 18 and 24 years of age (n=207, 83%). The sample was also representative of the gender and racial demographics of our university’s students. While the sample was representative of STEMM students at our university, results may not be generalizable to other institutions with different student enrollments and cultural contexts.

Although our survey contained two open-ended questions, this manuscript focuses primarily on quantitative data. We analyzed quantitative data using the SPSS 27 software. We used frequency rates, standardized rates, cross-tabulations, and chi-square tests to make sense of data and determine whether the findings were statistically significant.⁶

Results and Discussion: STEMM Students’ Writing Center Usage

Do STEMM Students Use Writing Centers?

According to our survey results, the simple answer to our question about usage was yes: STEMM students did use the writing center. In fact, survey results showed STEMM students’ usage rates were much higher than the general population of students. Approximately 30% (n=113) of STEMM undergraduates stated they had used the writing center during their undergraduate career, while 70% (n=264) stated they had not; this usage rate exceeds the 5 to 10% of Augusta University undergraduates who use the center annually according to WCOnline statistics. While this trend is encouraging, it is most likely due to the high number of STEMM majors at our university rather than STEMM students’ valuation of writing center support. Since the majority of Augusta University undergraduates major in STEMM, higher-than-average usage rates among this student population are to be expected. While this finding may not tell us much about STEMM students’ usage motivations, it does suggest that universities who enroll large numbers of STEMM students can expect these students to seek writing support. However, as we discuss later, writing centers may need to dig deeper than usage rates to determine if STEMM students’ disciplinary writing needs are being met.

We also found that upperclassmen were more likely to have used the writing center than underclassmen. This is not surprising given that they’ve had more time to make use of the center during their academic journey. A limitation of our study was that we did not ask participants to identify when they used the writing center (e.g., freshman, sophomore, junior, and/or senior year). Thus, we were unable to determine if it is more likely for STEMM students to come to the writing center earlier, later, or in multiple stages of their degree programs. We were also not able to see if early usage made it more likely for STEMM students to return to the writing center later in their career. We recommend that other institutions who conduct similar studies ask questions about usage over time.

We also wanted to know if there were patterns in usage behavior by major. Is it more likely, for example, that computer science majors will use the writing center than biology majors? We were not able to run cross-tabulations or chi-square tests to identify statistically significant usage patterns by major because we allowed students to select more than one major on the survey and some majors had five or fewer respondents. Instead, we calculated and compared standard rates by dividing the total number of “yes” and “no” responses to the question “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?” by the total number of respondents by major. We then multiplied each dividend by 100. After calculating usage rates by major, we realized some major populations were still very small, which skewed the data; for example, it is a leap to suggest that radiologic science majors have a standard usage rate of 0 based on only one respondent in this major category. Consequently, we decided to group majors under wider disciplinary umbrellas: biological sciences, physical sciences, computer sciences, and health sciences. Surprisingly, we found that these disciplinary umbrellas had similar writing center usage rates per 100 majors (+/- ≤5). Results can be seen in Table 2 below.

This data surprised us because WCOnline usage statistics consistently show that majors such as nursing, kinesiology, and biology make more appointments at our center than other STEMM majors. Converting usage frequencies from the survey into standardized numerical rates, however, shows these patterns are most likely due to higher enrollments in these major programs rather than to predictable patterns of major-specific usage behaviors. A limitation of standardized rates is that they make predictions for larger populations based on a limited, smaller sample. Despite this limitation, these rates have changed our outlook on specific majors and influenced our plans for STEMM outreach. For example, we originally feared computer science majors may be less likely to use writing centers than other STEMM majors based on low frequency rates of use. We wondered if this had something to do with the discipline itself—its perceptions of writing and/or the amount and types of writing assigned. As a staff, we discussed how to make ourselves more visible to students in our School of Computer Sciences. We spent numerous hours developing tailored outreach to make our services more visible to faculty and students in this school, but this may not have been time well-spent. Since finishing our study, we have shifted our focus. While we still spend some time identifying ways to increase our visibility within specific disciplines, we now prioritize a more holistic STEMM-focused brand, learning about disciplinary curricula, and designing discipline-specific trainings and resources. By adjusting our approach to branding and how we spend our time, we can be better equipped to support writers in specific disciplines when they do come through our doors, which, in turn, earns writers’ trust. Other writing centers can use standardized rates to identify patterns of usage by major to develop more strategic outreach plans and STEMM writing supports.

Beyond usage by major and umbrella disciplines, we also wanted to identify correlations between usage and student demographics. As sites committed not only to writing instruction, but to socially just educational practices, writing centers must consider how they contribute to or resist systemic educational and professional inequities that affect STEMM students. According to a recent report published by the Pew Research Center, there continues to be underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic STEMM majors at the undergraduate and graduate levels, a trend that leads to underrepresentation in the STEMM workforce after graduation. Similarly, although women fill many careers in the health professions, they are under-represented in higher-earning STEMM fields such as computer science and engineering (Fry et al.). On a panel on demographic gaps in STEMM jobs, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bridget Long, pointed out socio-economic, race/ethnicity, and gender gaps are formed long before students arrive at college. In our study, we were curious about the ways demographics affected STEMM students’ writing center usage.

To identify correlations, we ran cross-tabulations and chi-square tests between writing center usage and several demographic variables, including race, gender, first-generation college student status, Pell Grant eligibility, first-generation American status, and native language. While we did not find statistically significant patterns of usage related to gender and race, our findings overall align with Lori Salem’s earlier study on writing center usage behaviors: minoritized students were more likely to use the writing center. Students who reported being first-generation American, non-traditional/returning, Pell Grant eligible, and English Language Learning/multilingual were most likely to seek support at the writing center (p = 0.002, p=0.036, p=0.037, and p=0.004, respectively). Echoing Salem’s findings and the words of Dean Long, studies by Emerson have also found that STEMM writers’ early childhood and K-12 experiences with writing significantly shape writing identity and perceptions of writing (“‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe). She found that early, negative writing experiences made STEMM students less likely to enjoy writing and see it as central to their career and disciplinary identity.

If STEMM writers’ perceptions of writing are influenced by early experiences and demographics, writing centers need to consider what they can do to form positive relationships with students who have had negative pre-college experiences related to writing and education. Writing centers can also do research within their institutions to determine why certain sub-populations of STEMM students are seeking writing center support more frequently than others: are faculty encouraging use due to perceptions of deficit or implicit biases? Do minoritized students feel inadequate or underprepared? Do higher usage rates by minoritized STEMM students contribute to their further “Othering'' within the academy—to use Salem’s words, is writing center usage by minoritized STEMM students a “downwardly mobile choice” that does more harm than good (162)? Or, conversely, are these students finding a safe space and a sense of belonging within the writing center? Does writing center usage by minoritized STEMM students make it less likely other STEMM students will use the center due to perceptions of stigma? How should writing centers go about providing direct instruction in scientific and technical communication in ways that empower minoritized students? Several writing center scholars have taken up these social justice questions in recent years, but it could be of value to think about how these issues affect STEMM students, who already face many systemic inequities and barriers in their chosen fields. As STEMM major enrollments increase in the United States and beyond, writing centers have a pressing responsibility to think about usage in connection to linguistic and social justice.

How do STEMM Students Use Writing Centers?

Our survey also sought to learn how STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. Do they use writing centers for coursework in the core curriculum? For courses in their majors? For both? What kinds of assignments in their majors do they bring to the writing center? Do they trust writing center staff to help them with coursework in their major? Survey results showed STEMM students were more likely to use the writing center for courses in the core curriculum than for coursework in their major. If students responded “yes” to the question, “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?,” they were taken to two follow-up questions:

Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in a non-major course? (For example, a non-major course in the University core curriculum could be English 1102: English Composition.)
Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in a course required for your STEMM major? (For example, a required course in the Biology major course could be BIOL 4100: Principles of Biology.)

One hundred and twelve students responded to these follow-up questions. Of the 91 students who responded “yes” to question one, 82.4% (n=75) used the writing center for a non-major course, while only 17.6% (n=16) used the writing center for a major and non-major course. Of the 21 students who responded “no” to question one, 38.1% (n=8) had used the center for a major course, while 61.9% (n=13) reported using it neither for a major or non-major course (See Figure 1).⁷ Findings were statistically significant (p=0.039).

Using the writing center as a site of non-disciplinary support is a trend consistent with past research conducted by Laura Hazelton Jones et al. Although they had a very small sample, Hazelton Jones et al. reported that of 11 engineering majors, only three students had used the writing center prior to the study, with only one of the three using it for a major course. The researchers suggest this usage behavior “could imply that the students in this sample did not see the connection between their first-year composition courses and the writing in their engineering courses” (64). They recommend that consultants focus on genre awareness and transfer of knowledge to improve sessions with STEMM majors, something the current study would also support. The cross-tab analysis also suggests that seeking writing support for projects outside of the major does not necessarily lead to students returning for support with writing in the major. To address this trend, our center plans to implement a return visit campaign for STEMM users using WCOnline usage records and enrollment data in the software EAB Navigate. At strategic points each semester, we will generate a list of STEMM majors who have visited the writing center in the past. We will then send past users a personalized email inviting them back, along with ways we can assist with writing in the disciplinary courses in which they are currently enrolled. We are hopeful that outreach campaigns like this one will encourage STEMM students to see the writing center as a space that supports them within their major as well as within the core curriculum.

We were also interested in finding out why STEMM students chose not to use the writing center. The students who responded “no” to the question, “Have you ever visited the Augusta University Writing Center for help with an assignment due in any of your Augusta University courses?” were directed to a multiple-choice question asking them for their rationale (see Table 3). STEMM students who did not use the writing center for either major or non-major coursework reported a variety of reasons: “I didn’t need to do so” and “I’m satisfied with my grades already” were the most frequent responses. Another common response was “I don’t have many writing assignments.” Taken together, these three responses show STEMM students’ usage behaviors are motivated by need; if their grades are satisfactory, they may not see the need to use the writing center. Similarly, if they are not being assigned writing, they are not likely to use the writing center.

Based on survey responses, we might conclude students don’t use the writing center for major courses because writing is not assigned in these courses. This conclusion makes sense considering Augusta University’s lack of writing-intensive curricular requirements. However, although “I don’t have many writing assignments” scored high on students’ reasons for not using the writing center for courses in their major, this may not paint the whole picture of STEMM disciplinary writing at our institution. This high score may be related to how STEMM students and, by extension, their faculty, define “writing.”

We asked students if faculty in their disciplines assigned writing and, if so, what kinds of writing were assigned. Students were asked to score how often faculty assigned discipline-specific writing on a four-point scale (1=never, 2=occasionally, 3=somewhat frequently, 4=very frequently). Table 3 shows the mean frequency score by assignment type.

As Table 3 shows, despite several students reporting that they did not have many disciplinary writing assignments, they were, in fact, assigned a variety of writing tasks in their STEMM courses, with mean frequency scores falling between “occasionally” and “somewhat frequently” for most genres (excluding posters, which were assigned less frequently). Although Melzer’s study of writing assignments across the curriculum is almost a decade old, students’ responses to our survey show essay exams and research papers—the two genres most frequently assigned by faculty according to Melzer’s study—were most common, along with lab reports. If STEMM students are assigned writing in their disciplines, why are they not bringing these assignments to the writing center at higher rates?

In a qualitative study on high-achieving STEM students, Thomas Deans noticed a telling theme: these students were dismissive of disciplinary genres such as lab reports and did not view them as writing. When he asked students why, “they would reply that those [lab reports] were ‘just, like checking boxes’…most did not see such tightly constrained reporting and discussion of results, or collaborative writing, as ‘really writing’” (164). Students in Deans’s study also noted that their performance in common genres was usually based on reporting “information” rather than on the quality of writing or using writing as a mode of discovery (164). Deans’s qualitative findings echo Melzer’s earlier quantitative results. Melzer’s analysis of assignment prompts revealed that the most frequently-assigned genres in higher education are information-driven, and prompts for the most ubiquitous genres, such as essay exams and research papers, often do not provide enough information about the rhetorical situation and disciplinary expectations for students to move beyond regurgitating content (41-52). Within this kind of framework, writing is simply a means to an end—a container for factual information. It is not a skill connected to self-reflexivity, knowledge-making, audience engagement, or innovation, and thus is not noteworthy or prioritized by students (or faculty). Our survey results tell a similar story. Like Melzer’s and Deans’s findings, our study suggests STEMM students may not perceive disciplinary writing tasks as “real writing,” and they may have limited experience using writing to learn or as a rhetorical act intended to persuade audiences beyond their teacher as examiner.

Students’ qualitative responses also suggested they perceived disciplinary writing assignments as formulaic and content-focused, and they connected this view of writing to their decision not to use the writing center for disciplinary writing tasks. For instance, one student responded, “I don’t have many opportunities to write in my major outside of exams and lab reports, so I never felt the need to use the writing center (especially because lab reports are so professor specific as far as formatting and requirements),” while another explained, “the only writing assignments I receive are lab reports and professors provide a format that students must strictly follow.” Comments such as “the actual writing isn’t even considered, it’s just the information itself;” “the writing assigned in my major focuses on accurate information…the emphasis is not really put on stuff like transition sentences;” and “[scientific writing] follows a very strict format with little room for flexibility” were common among respondents. Overall, STEMM students perceived writing in scientific and technical genres to be an exercise in translation—a means of proving their recall of facts to the professor—rather than an exercise in creativity, rhetorical agency, or discovery.

STEMM students’ view of technical genres as formulaic and content-driven also seemed connected to their view of the writing center as a place for “larger” and “new” tasks, such as longer research papers, rather than for “small” and “familiar” tasks, such as lab reports and discussion boards, another survey finding. These themes together suggest STEMM students may not see the value of using writing centers for more mundane, day-to-day writing assignments in their disciplines, even though these writing tasks are foundational to their growth and work as scientists. Furthermore, even if students are assigned larger projects in their STEMM courses, such as a research paper, they may be unsure how to ask for help, since this may be the first time they are engaging with writing as a mode of discovery or argument and disciplinary expectations for the genre may be unclear.

To learn more about STEMM students’ help-seeking beliefs and behaviors, we also asked them to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements related to staff expertise and the writing center’s capability to assist with disciplinary writing tasks (see Table 5). Agreement was ranked on a four-point scale (1=strong disagree; 2=somewhat disagree; 3=somewhat agree; 4=strongly agree).

Students offered mixed responses about the writing center’s ability to help them with disciplinary writing tasks. Quantitative responses showed some trust in staff expertise. Most respondents “somewhat agreed” that writing center staff can help them improve their disciplinary writing. While quantitative responses suggested writing center staff expertise may not play a role in usage behaviors, qualitative responses told a more complicated story. Eleven respondents expressed doubt about staff members’ ability to help with STEMM writing. One student wrote, for example: “Biology majors do not write much aside from lab reports. Someone who understands the experiments and can interpret the data to formulate a report could help write it, but I doubt many workers at the writing center have the background to do so. I do not see myself using the center at any time in the future.” Another wrote, “If I do need help, I go to the professor since they can tell me exactly what they expect of me and can help guide me accurately on their assignment. I would be more likely to use the writing center if they knew the expectations of the professors on specific assignments. I feel like I could be misguided by using the writing center if they do not know what the professors are expecting of the students.” Several respondents expressed a desire to see more STEMM majors working in the writing center or for there to be a scientific writing “section/division” of the center specifically for STEMM users.

These responses paired with survey results overall have pushed our center to reconsider WAC/WID partnerships at our institution as well as the way we approach writing center staffing and training. Melzer found that being connected to a WAC program significantly increases the likelihood that students will engage with the exploratory and rhetorical dimensions of writing (24). To begin this work, our center launched a WAC Speaker Series that provides STEMM faculty with training for integrating writing-to-learn and learning-to-write activities into their courses. We have also begun to offer more workshops and consultations for faculty focused on writing assignment design and assessment. While we have begun an embedded consulting program in our university’s Honors thesis sequence that supports STEMM students’ writing development, we hope to pilot embedded writing consultants in STEMM major courses in the future. We have also created a five-year plan that lays the groundwork—alongside faculty and program partners—for developing writing-intensive course requirements in the core and disciplines.

Since conducting our study, we have also hired three full-time professional staff members with expertise in scientific and technical communication to support STEMM students and faculty and provide more specialized training in scientific style writing to undergraduate and graduate peer consultants. Catherine Siemann makes the convincing argument that professional tutoring staff are “particularly well suited to work with STEM subjects and STEM students” because they “bring a confidence to working with writing outside their own academic field” (111-112). Our professional staff also have contractual effort allocations devoted to researching STEMM genres and disciplines so that they can bring nuanced writing expertise to their sessions with STEMM writers. Siemann argues, “genre and rhetorical knowledge can guide writing center staff to useful positioning with regard to lab reports, personal statements, and papers in scientific and technical fields” (114). Similarly, in her article on training undergraduate tutors to work effectively with STEMM writers, Ashna Shome points out the importance of providing tutors with STEM-specific genre and rhetorical knowledge as well as training in scientific style conventions.

In addition to expanding our services and staffing, our center revamped its website, social media, and outreach to feature more STEMM writers, genres, and disciplines so that STEMM students see the writing center’s ability and commitment to working with STEMM writing. This is part of our holistic STEMM rebranding approach mentioned earlier. We added a full page on our website devoted to scientific and technical communication. This page provides definitions of genres and audiences as well as internal and external resources for STEMM writers. It also lists all of the STEMM-specific genres our staff can assist with, including genres survey respondents dismissed as formulaic, such as lab reports. Our website changes might help STEMM writers see these genres as substantial—that is, rhetorical, bound up in the scientific process, and connected to discovery-making. We also realized many of our outreach materials, such as social media posts, flyers, and posters, focused on humanities and social sciences writers/staff and often featured non-STEMM genres and concerns. In addition to adding the scientific and technical communication page of our website, we have also diversified our materials to feature images of STEMM activities, such as students working in labs or presenting scientific posters, and we make explicit mention of scientific and technical genres. Images of scientists doing scientific work and presenting scientific texts are now front and center on our website’s homepage and on our social media posts. Although it is still too early to quantify impact, since implementing these changes, we have seen an increase in the number of appointments focused on STEMM disciplinary writing. Other writing centers might consider ways they can rebrand themselves to earn STEMM students’ trust.

While earning STEMM students’ trust is one of our center’s continuing priorities, we also realized we needed to rebrand to convince high-performing STEMM students that seeking writing support is worth their time. Encouragingly, our survey revealed that STEMM students who did visit the writing center for both major and non-major coursework reported high rates of satisfaction for both types of usage. For both major and non-major-focused consultations, approximately 70% of students scored the writing center a 6 or above on a satisfaction scale of 1 to 10, with one being “not at all useful” and 10 being “extremely useful” (see figure 2).

But, unfortunately, we just weren’t seeing enough students for major coursework to build on this momentum because most STEMM students felt the writing center was a remedial space that would not serve them well. Forty-five quantitative responses indicated STEMM students did not use the writing center because they were “making good grades already.” Similarly, we received many qualitative responses such as “I’m generally satisfied with my own work,” “I consider myself a good writer, and my grades often reflect that,” and “I trust my ability enough to avoid using the Augusta University Writing Center.”

To get more STEMM students in the door, writing centers may need to emphasize their ability to support and benefit advanced STEMM writers. Since distributing this survey, we have renamed our center “The Center for Writing Excellence'' as part of our attempt to appeal to high-performing STEMM undergraduates. Our staff training prioritizes both directive and non-directive instruction and we aim to support students of all ability levels. We felt all students, regardless of their background or level of preparation, might be inspired by the idea that a writing center is about cultivating excellence. We have also revised our mission, vision, and value statements to reflect our university’s focus on research, especially STEMM research, and we have begun highlighting testimonials from STEMM users on our outreach materials; these students often speak about reasons their visit was helpful that resonate with other STEMM students.

Our center has also pushed the narrative that all advanced writers get feedback on their writing—it is a normal part of the writing process and reflects the sociality of writing. To support this and meet faculty and graduate student needs, our center has expanded to work more with faculty and graduate students in one-on-one consultations. We refer to high usage rates by these populations when working with undergraduates (approximately 50% of our consultations each year are held with graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, most of whom are in STEMM disciplines) to show them that experienced professionals in their fields value the writing center and a collaborative approach to the writing process. Our orientation leaders have also updated their campus tour script about the CWE to focus on the center’s support for research and advanced writing. These changes, paired with initiatives such as our embedded consulting program in the Honors thesis sequence, connect writing support with research, publication, and grant funding activities. STEMM students are beginning to see how the writing center is woven into the tapestry that professionalizes them as respected researchers in their disciplines.

Future Directions

Our survey provides insight into how undergraduate STEMM students use and perceive writing centers. Our data led to several changes within our writing center that we hope serve as inspiration for other centers looking to better serve STEMM student populations. While our survey provided useful information about STEMM students, we believe more research is needed to identify ways writing centers can meet these students’ needs, especially for courses in their major. We encourage researchers to replicate our study to see if they reach similar conclusions; we also encourage cross-institutional research on STEMM student usage. Future research studies could also focus more on the timing and sequencing of STEMM undergraduate writing center visits, something our study did not account for: do STEMM students visit early in their academic careers? If so, is this a strong predictor they will continue to use writing centers as they move through their degree programs? If STEMM students use writing centers for core courses, does this make it more likely they will use writing centers for major courses? Why or why not?

Another valuable area of research would be learning how STEMM students perceive consultations for core versus major courses: do they see these consultations as connected, and do they thus transfer general writing skills to disciplinary contexts? If so, how does this transfer occur, and what can consultants do to facilitate it? If not, what barriers or rhetorical situations keep STEMM students from transferring more general writing skills to disciplinary tasks within the context of writing consultations, and how might this affect writing center administrators’ approaches to staff training? Overall, more qualitative research on STEMM students and writing centers is needed to better understand their perceptions, needs, and motivations for using or not using writing support.

As the literature discussed in this article shows, most scientists and STEMM faculty realize writing is central to their disciplines; however, most undergraduate students, who often lack explicit instruction in scientific and technical writing, have yet to come to this realization. Writing centers can play an important role in helping STEMM students develop writing identities earlier. Writing centers are places that normalize talk about writing and learning through writing, invaluable skills for novice scientists. We look forward to seeing the creative ways writing centers will adapt to better serve increasing numbers of STEMM students.

NOTES

The authors thank Drs. Melissa Powell-Williams and Candace Griffith for their instruction in SPSS and statistical analysis. The authors also thank the Augusta University Honors Program, Department of English and World Languages, and Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences for their support throughout this project.
There is a wealth of scholarship in WAC/WID and the disciplines discussing the lack of writing in STEMM curricula. For good overviews of this scholarship that connect STEMM writing curricula to composition studies, see Emerson, “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Madson; and Moon et al.
Research on improving STEMM students’ scientific writing ability abounds. For a few examples of this scholarship, see Brownell et al. (biology); Clark and Fischback (health sciences); Davies et al. (computer science); Finkenstaedt-Quinn et al. (chemistry); and Poe et al. (engineering). See also Hendrickson et al.’s special issue of Across the Disciplines on STEM and WAC/WID, as well as Bazerman and Russell’s foundational edited collection, Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, especially the chapters in section 4, “Writing in the Disciplines” and Herrington’s chapter, “Writing in Academic Settings.” Much of the scholarship on integrating writing into STEMM disciplines is published outside of WAC/WID and rhetoric and composition journals. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) journals in the STEMM disciplines are generative sources of STEMM writing curriculum research.
For composition studies’ scholarship that reviews the extant literature on STEMM faculty barriers to teaching writing in the undergraduate classroom, see Bean; Emerson, “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe; Lane et al.; Poe et al.; Moon et al.; and Thompson et al. Also see foundational studies by Beaufort, Mallette, and Windsor that show how writing is often viewed separately from and subordinated to content in STEMM education and practice.
This study was approved by Augusta University’s Institutional Review Board (#1696275-2).
Statistical significance was set at <~p=0.05.
Students who responded “no” to both questions point to limitations with the survey. Since students were only prompted to answer these two questions if they had been to the writing center before, but 13 responded “no” when asked if they used it for a major or non-major course, it implies some students responded to the earlier question about usage inaccurately or that these students were using the writing center for projects outside of coursework—something our survey did not consider.

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