Increasing Student Confidence in Writing: Integrating Authentic Manuscript Writing into an Online 8-Week Research Program

In various formats, students at the secondary and postsecondary levels participate in multiweek authentic science research projects. There have been many papers explaining the operations of such programs, but few have provided explicit instruction on how to incorporate authentic communication practices into the student research process. In this paper, we describe how we integrated primary literature into an 8-week online research program for 8th to 11th graders. Each week, students were introduced to a specific section of a primary research article reflecting different stages of their research project, and they were guided on how to write that specific section for their own research paper. By the end of the program, students had an outline or first draft of a primary research paper based on their research. Following completion of the program, student participants reported greater self-efficacy and confidence in scientific writing. Here, we describe our approach and provide an adaptable framework for integrating primary literature into research projects.