Laboratory work has a central and distinctive role in the teaching of science, and laboratory writing is especially used to promote the research and scientific communication among the students. This article analyzes the writing practices related to laboratory reports using the IMRD template (introduction, method, result and discussion) within the framework of Biotechnological Processes (BP) classes. Similarly, work guidelines are developed that provide instructions for the science laboratory and address problems and dilemmas of scientific writing in real contexts and provide possibilities for accompaniment to facilitate this task.

The questions guiding this article are: “What problems do frequently occur when writing laboratory results? What problems do frequently occur when writing the Discussion and Conclusion sections in a laboratory reports? What are the student’s and professor’s perceptions about these problems? What possibilities of support for writing in this genre can be identified?”

Undergraduate writing is an opportunity (Carter, 2007; Wallace, et al. 2004; Yager, 2004) since students experience some situations typical for scientists who write articles, books and procedures. In their writing, scientists share theoretical and empirical frameworks and validation criteria that allow them and others understand the scientific method. Students see how they can reflect this in their writing of reports. It is these writing practices in the laboratory, and not the abstract and uncommitted theories, that primarily define what disciplines are and how knowledge is coded and codified (Bazerman, 1988; Hyland, 2000, 2006).

Latour and Woolgar (1986) have suggested that the modern research laboratory devotes more effots to produce articles than to make discoveries, and that scientist’s time is devoted largely to the discussion and preparation of articles for publication in competition with other laboratories. It is precisely within that struggle to write in a way that is clear, concise and stylistically consistent with conventions and standards of science that this study emerged to investigate the writing practices of the BP laboratory reports. The intention is to analyze and intervene into the most frequent writing problems in this genre.

The laboratory is a space where activities are carried out promoting the development of logic, research capacities and problem-solving skills through the learning of concepts and procedures guided by the scientific method. Reading and writing texts provides the knowledge necessary for students to conduct experiments, select and control variables, and think about materials and instruments. The activity is mediated by a professor in the role of expert researcher. Specifically, the work done in this kind of class is related to bioprocesses ¹ .

Through discussion, a space is created where students must think like scientists. This implies that they tap into the professional sphere since the laboratory reflects what can happen in the industry. In this sense, they put into practice diverse professional competencies. The laboratory is a scenario where students acquire the skills to perform and monitor bioprocesses. Therefore, they require theoretical foundations and competencies in applying quantitative techniques and the importance of collaborative work. All this shall be used for evaluating the behaviors of various microorganisms and the production of metabolites. Quantitative techniques include the use of production parameters that provide important information about raw materials and processing times

Numerous studies have shown the central role laboratories play in the training of scientists by involving students in knowledge construction activities (Read, 1969; Anderson, 1973; Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982, 2004; Tobin, 1990; Lazarowitz and Tamir, 1994; Lunetta et al., 2007). As stated by Read (1969) "scientific attitudes of mind must be taught, both by criticisms of student's efforts and by examples. The sooner this is taught the better since these attitudes are the essence of experimentation” (p. 78).

This is a case study that focuses on "a limited number of facts and situations in order to address them as deeply as required to reach a holistic and contextual understanding" (Vasilachis de Gialdino, 2006, p. 218). The aim is to delimit the object studied in relation to its particularities and within the framework of its complexity, specifically examining the writing practices in the laboratory of a scientific community. Teaching activities are looked at, in terms of writing, as a portal to learning so that a description of everyday situations is provided showing how social life and scientific practice are intertwined in the interactions between students and professors exposed to writing and the mastery of discursive genres in the laboratory.

The study was conducted during the first semester 2018 in the BP course of the Industrial Microbiology program at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. This course includes lecture classes, workshops, class work, and laboratory work. Microorganisms and the processes derived from them are studied aiming to obtain products of interest. This prepares the students for working in industries such as biotechnological processes, technological development and goods production. Class and laboratory work of 30 students in seventh semester was observed. A blind random sample of 20 laboratory reports was taken. Analysis of these reports focused on problems when writing the Results, Discussion and Conclusion sections. Some lecture classes were also observed, and students and professors were interviewed.

The information was analyzed following the tasks proposed by Miles & Huberman (1994): data reduction, synthesis, and grouping and verification of results. An interpretive qualitative analysis sought to translate all significant meanings from the course into the categories of a coding framework (Schreier, 2012). The coding scheme focused on discursive units related to writing, laboratory reports and learning. This scheme was validated by an language expert and a science expert, so that the confrontation in the coding would guarantee its reliability. Based on the interviews, the perceptions of teachers and students about the laboratory space and the writing of reports were analyzed. Being an exploratory research with a relatively small sample of interviewees, the quantification of data was not deemed pertinent. Only the distribution was identified in relation to the kinds of recurring writing problems in the laboratory reports. The results are not intended to be generalizable; rather, they offer preliminary answers on how students and professors perceive the role of writing in the context of the laboratory reports.

This section presents our findings related to the contextualization of reading and writing practices in the classes observed, the interviewee’s perception of the laboratory, and the genre of laboratory reports. It also analyzes the problems most frequently found and alternatives that arise through these activities, tasks and achievements.

Laboratory activities have played a role in the science curriculum long ago, and scientific educators have suggested the benefits of involving students in science laboratory activities (Hodson, 1993; Hofstein, 2004; Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004; Lunetta, et al. 2007). Research laboratories have the potential for developing student’s skills including asking scientifically-oriented questions, formulating hypotheses, designing and carrying out scientific investigations, stating and reviewing explanations, communicating and defending scientific arguments (Hofstein et al. 2005). It is a learning space that engages students and professors in the application and verification of scientific knowledge. As long as new scientific problems are raised, background, conceptualizations and experiments are reviewed, equipment and materials are manipulated, explanations are written and explained, and arguments around scientific phenomena are studied.

Students and professors’ perceptions about the laboratory and laboratory reports were in agreement with these ideas. Here you are some comments by one of the authors.

The laboratory is worth a lot because it is where students must acquire skills and apply the concepts they read. The advantage with this learning space is that it combines analysis of the lectures with the delivery of written reports. Analysis of these reports over the time allows us to see whether they have more and more writing difficulties. Discussing results is their biggest difficulty. Students present result tables without analysis or discussion (Teacher 1, personal communication, april, 2018).

Everything they do and read in class is used to make decisions and become more competent at the professional level. The value of the laboratory is that it provides some of the logical thinking and experience necessary for the decision-making. This involves answering questions such as, “What is the process that should be implemented? Why? and Which dimension is the most important for this process: economic, social, or environmental?” (Teacher 1, personal communication, March, 2018). The decision-making process is one of the most difficult to consolidate within professional training (Teacher 1, personal communication, april, 2018).

In accordance with this, activities that promote research skills and problem solving through understanding concepts and procedures, and which are guided by the scientific method, are performed within the laboratory space. Students read articles that provide them with the knowledge necessary to develop experiments, select and control variables, think about materials and instruments and finally provide input and a model for writing a laboratory report. The activity is mediated by a professor who is a research expert.

Here are perceptions of several students about laboratory reports:

I think that what we read in articles and what we do in the laboratory are not independent, because, although the methodologies are different, the former serves as a model to follow. (Student interviewed_1, discussion group, May, 2018)

We debate the articles a lot, so if an article is experimental, it must have a theoretical basis. For this reason, we refer to them not only to understand how an experimental part was. Many of them give us concepts that we need for making reports. (Student interviewed_2, discussion group, May, 2018)

At the moment that you make a report, you guided by some standards that have been established by professors as well as the authors of some of the articles. For example, what we did now was report a cell count from a Neubauer counting chamber. The way to do it is standardized like the process with ethanol units. From there we base ourselves on the results. (Student interviewed_1, discussion group, May, 2018)

In the results, well writing…writing isn’t a problem because you show what was given to you and you put it there. The problem of writing is when we begin an argument. (Student interviewed_3, discussion group, May, 2018)

It’s just that sometimes the discussion gets confused with the writing of the theoretical framework. For example, if you are going to discuss the percentage difference of discoloration of fungus that was given to me here in the laboratory and how it was given to person X, I could make the mistake of starting by saying, ‘the fungus is characterized by this, and that is not what we are looking for.’ We are looking for the percentage of discoloration that this fungus can provide. Many times, these kinds of things are confused when they are written. (Student interviewed_5, discussion group, May, 2018)

Well, we say that we have to base ourselves primarily on how we should handle everything in the laboratory. In fact, a professor told me that there was no use for a microbiologist who had good knowledge if he did not know how to apply it in the laboratory. Precisely for that reason, we focus on how you work in the laboratory… because you can learn a lot of theory, but if you get to a laboratory and you know how to do complex calculation, but you arrive and do not know how to prepare a culture. You can know many complex things, but when it comes to applying them everything is different. (Student interviewed_7, discussion group, May, 2018)

There are many processes that need precision. Then, it's up to you to practice in order to gain experience. That way you know you are doing things well. (Student interviewed_2, discussion group, May, 2018)

The most important thing in a lab session is technique. You can know the theory, but when you are working in such an environment there are things that even the theory does not tell you. By analysis, or because the professors give you some little tips that can influence the technique, well then, you already know. You have to follow the conditions that the technique tells you to the letter and you cannot change anything. The professors sometimes do it because they have experience and they know what happens if they change this or that, but one who is a novice cannot experiment with what happens if you remove a minute from the technique. (Student interviewed_5, discussion group, May, 2018)

These perceptions show that reading research articles provides students with a model of how to write their reports (3 and 4), i.e., they study and evaluate literature that is useful for their performance in the laboratory. There are also recognized norms and standards for the writing of reports (5). It has also been said that the problems in these texts are mainly in the Results, Discussion and Conclusion sections (6). For example, discussion is often confused with the theoretical framework (7). On the other hand, the importance of the technical component of the laboratory performance (8, 9 and 10) is recognized. Hence, students recognize the need to have skills to manipulate devices and use materials when conducting their experiments. In fact, the laboratory is constituted as a scenario where students acquire skills for assembling and monitoring bioprocesses. Therefore, they acquire theoretical foundations and the competence to apply quantitative techniques that allows them evaluating production parameters.

The issues raised by the students show that working in the laboratory promotes scientific education, including the understanding of scientific concepts (Domin, 2007), practical scientific skills and problem solving skills (Reid and Shah, 2007), scientific mental habits and understanding the nature of science (Vhurumuku, 2011). Likewise, it involves getting involved in research and scientific writing practices that they use to communicate and report the procedures, understandings and scientific findings in an objective way, which, in turn, enables to assess how valid their approaches are. That is, learning to develop and share a research context —the laboratory— from the theoretical and the empirical involved in the writing practices (Kelly et al., 2008; Saul, 2004).

Next section looks at writing problems related to the Results, Discussion and Conclusion sections, the most critical from a professor’s point of view. In fact, college students do not always have experience in writing a report. One study (Kalaskas, 2013) revealed that less than a half of the college respondents expressed not to know how to make a report since they did not learned it at high school. They had feelings of frustration and were "unsure of what a lab report is, how and why it is organized the way it is, and why it matters in science in the first place" (p.115).

This section must present data in tables, graphs and figures. In addition, it must include calculation of basic statistics such as averages, standard deviations, and coefficients of variation of sequential replicates. The latter is intended to detect experimental errors. Replicas are then discarded to produce a final table with reliable values.

The most recurrent problems are shown in Figure 3. It shows that Type 1 problems account for the largest percentage of laboratory report errors. This occurs because authors sometimes fail to take into account that text in figures and tables must be short and clear, and the reader expects to understand the figure or table without referring to the text. Type 3 problems are important because these errors lead to incorrect analyses that negatively affect the discussion of results.

Figure 3. Figure 3. Distribution according to Type of Problem found in the Results section of laboratory reports (n = 20) Source: own source

The Results section reports data collected during the experiment. It requires that the information be clearly presented in graphs, figures and/or tables according to the rules/standards typical to the discipline. It also requires to provide calculations allowing reliable evaluation of results with respect to the hypothesis.

Although the idea of ​​a radical change in the writing of laboratory reports based on recommendations or assistance courses has not been proposed so far, some changes should be introduced. These include practices, tasks, activities and instruments such as rubrics that can significantly contribute to reduce problems that students showed when writing the specific laboratory report sections chosen herein. Starting by the recognition of problems, improvement strategies can be generated that allow rethinking the time and space management both in the laboratory and the classroom. This should allow writing examples to be used, students should learn to write through multiple drafts as well as learning the value of the feedback and the importance of developing guidelines for reading scientific literature. These measures can make possible to understand how scientists present their results and how they use them to construct arguments. In turn, this will allow students becoming aware of what textually and discursively characterizes each section of a laboratory report. It will also allow them understanding that the laboratory space gives them the opportunity to understand the physical world, write texts and internalize scientific thought.

According to Winsor (1990), language influences the very nature of activity and the way individuals interact around objects of the physical world. In this case, the objects are associated with discolorations and transformations of substrates into products such as acids, biomasses, and amino acids. Along the same lines, Gee (1999) proposed that the language in use provides support and structure to any human activity while supporting associations and connections among individuals, social groups and institutions within a culture. In the case of BP, different codes, conventions, norms and standards are used together with other symbolic systems to create epistemic and scientific elaborations around particular contexts, especially within the framework of industry.

Similarly, students are iteratively involved in reading, writing and solving problems from graphs. For these students, this represents being acquainted with the conventions and what Barquero et al. (2000) called "visuospatial configurations of graphic elements". This is the combination of knowledge and certain cognitive abilities for interpreting the constituent elements of graphs, which allows for internal and thematic consistency of the information displayed. Nevertheless, as previously indicated, the Results section in a laboratory report poses a difficulty that requires the professor's support. In addition to the use of graphics as arguments in the context of the discussion of results, graphs are constituted as inscription instruments (Latour and Woolgar, 1986). They are semiotic systems that serve the construction and representation of the order of the world by a sicientist, while providing structure and support for the interaction of students and professors within the framework of the laboratory. The possibilities for transforming material substances into a figure or external representation system are established through graphs, tables, diagrams, conceptual maps, equations, and statistical data.

The laboratory is then constituted as a context explicitly intended to teach technical, scientific, and professional practices where six skills are put into play according to Jeffrey (1967, cited by Hofstein and Lunetta, 1982):

Communication: identification of laboratory equipment and operations

Literature about situated learning and writing genres in different academic disciplines has suggested that as students begin to learn skills within a discipline, they are also learning to become members of a rhetorical and situated discursive community (Kirschner and Meester, 1988; Dannels, 2000). In the case studied here, skills include designing experiments to test or verify hypotheses and performance of activities that allow students understanding the scientific method. Students learn not only content, but also standards and expectations in that particular area of ​​specialization. This learning generally occurs through experiencing genres of writing in a particular discipline, engaging in research in that discipline, reporting and interpreting data from experiments, applying knowledge from and about solving problems, and interpreting texts from the discipline (Berkenkotter et al. 1988; Blakeslee, 1997). However, as this article evinces, the construction of scientific knowledge is observable and verifiable and builds, in turn, social and rhetorical knowledge. This is true because spaces like laboratories confront the students with decisions and activities that put their identity within an academic discipline and their values ​​as scientists at stake, and they fulfill rhetorical purposes according to the genres the students read and write.

The writing of laboratory reports that include Results, Discussion and Conclusions sections is essential for students of Industrial Microbiology because it involves not only teaching how to write but also involves interpreting the literature, breaking it down into its main findings and using it to build an argument and support a discussion. According to this analysis of writing problems in laboratory reports, the Conclusions and Discussion sections were the most difficult for students to write. To overcome these deficiencies, writing needs to be intensified in the first semesters since writing skills are difficult to develop in only one semester. In addition, students require support from their professors, and feedback strategies must be implemented. These should include peer review. Assignment of scientific literature analysis should also be intensified to continue developing the critical thinking and understanding of science. Finally, it is important to motivate students in advanced subjects so that they will continue working on this kind of writing.

This article contributes to the discussions on written genres within an academic discipline and the learning based on the recognition of the laboratoru as a space where scientific thinking is strengthened, problems are identified, experimental methods are understood, data are organized and interpreted, the relationships of facts are situated within the solution of problems, experiments are designed to test hypotheses, and —upon this basis— generalizations and conjectures are provided. For all these reasons, it is fundamental that the rhetorical structure of this kind of genre be taught (Peacock, 2011). Although laboratory work and, by extension, the writing of reports are scenarios that enhance the development of knowledge, skills and the scientific way of thinking, it is necessary to identify the most frequent problems and look for pedagogical support strategies. The student’s difficulties may be due to a lack of guidelines, other criteria to guide writing tasks, detailed description of structures, communicative purposes, discursive and rhetorical characteristics of a report, and evaluation criteria. As long as it is true, it is necessary to assume that writing is a process that includes planning, writing, reviewing and editing in specific genres, and that all of them can be supported by peer review, whereby students are also assumed to be evaluators.

Despite the contributions from this study, it is not exempt from limitations associated with a case study that does not represent all laboratories. Despite this, it does show practices typical to a microbiology laboratory as well as typical laboratory objectives, problems, strengths and weaknesses that are related to what it means to read, write, think and act as a scientist in a training environment. Therefore, a review of other spaces like this one is a pending work. There is a need to study other spaces where practices with these and other scientific disciplines are developed to enculturate scientists. This supposes to have the knowledge of norms, conventions, codes and standards, as well as a certain disciplinary identity. These should be studies of the specific conditions and strategies of laboratory work and their effects on the desired learning outcomes.

Finally, we believe that enhancing the scope and impact of these studies to improve the teaching of writing practices such as laboratory reporting requires the accompaniment by professors in the areas of science and language. In other words, we need to build bridges to foster the interdisciplinary understanding that not only supports the explanation of the scientific method itself but also supports textual and discursive issues specific to the writing of specific genres. The work of designing and executing experiments in the laboratory can create appropriate conditions for learning, interacting and discussing as scientists. In other words, this is the way to teach scenarios close to the reality of the industry.