Anyway now I assign undergraduates something like 15 pages a semester to write in formal writing, and then other informal writing. Seniors read about 1,000 pages in a semester which is about 75 a week or so I guess.

Freshman year I wrote all the time. In a quarter, we wrote about 30 pages for English comp. But I was also in French comp, which had about 15 pages, and Danish comp, which had a term paper of about that length, and history, which also had about 15 pages, so that was 75 pages in a quarter, so that was about 7.5 pages a week. It seemed like more because they had to be very good, logical pages, but I guess this is where I got my theory that you should write just over one good page every day and you would do well and still have time for life.

I think writing essays as a means to teach “critical thinking” is wildly over-rated. Studying math (and I mean math proofs), understanding physics and engineering seems to me a much more reliable method of improving one’s ability to analyze facts.

In my science department, it is rare to assign ANY writing. Twenty pages per semester? Never heard of it.

In my science classes, the labs required quite a bit of writing. Every week we had to write up whatever experiment we’d done in the style of a journal article (but without the abstract): with an introduction where we explained the theory behind whatever we were doing, a materials and methods section, results and discussion.

These lab reports would usually be 2-4 pages long, IIRC. I think having to write them — particularly the more theoretical sections, like the introduction and discussion — really helped deepen my understanding of the techniques we were using, what kind of information you get from each one, when you’d use one as opposed to another, etc.

@Historiann:

A class on evaluating journal articles would be really useful for most STEM majors, I would think.

Ooh, what a great idea! I wish I’d had a class like that, it would’ve been really helpful.

(I especially wish I had more background in statistics, now that I’m reviewing so many psych studies for my blog; I have to figure out what the difference is between all the different measures of significance they use, and what it means that they chose to use one over another, and it’s just really bringing home to me the inadequacy of my lone, one-semester Intro to Stats class!)

If we exclude the students who majored in natural sciences and math – how is the liberal arts doing? Did all those classes on feminist marxism improve their critical thinking?

Wrong question. It’s not a river, but a horizon. It can’t be reached. Or, put it differently, students will always do about half of what the teacher requires. Pissing and moaning the whole way. And in these days of tenure-by-evaluation, that means we have a problem. When meeting students’ receding expectations is a condition of continued employment, well, then we get studies documenting the slide, like this one. (To borrow CPP’s language: I don’t fucken care about their methodology. A fucken blind bat — at least a fucken blind bat who teaches — can see the process in every class.)

Re the purpose of pre-packaged labs in STE(not M): it’s to teach the techniques and use of equipment: how to pipette, how to calibrate a pH meter, how to find a given nerve in a rat dissection. Pretending that’s about any kind of “discovery,” or even thought, is an insult to the student’s intelligence.

On “critical” thinking even more important than reading or writing, I think, would be pure socratic dialogue. Relentless in-class questioning and answering with the compulsion to defend or repair weak points in the answers.

This is exactly how I run my small-group medical physiology tutorials.