Duke UniversityThompson Writing Program

Scholarship

While the work of the TWP Postdoctoral Fellowships centers on the development of faculty as teachers of writing, we anticipate that this work sponsors—and is sponsored by—active scholarly engagement. TWP faculty have written books and journal articles, presented at international, national, and local conferences, and conducted cutting-edge fieldwork across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Their work has been recognized by grants, honored with awards, and acclaimed by readers in the field.

 The TWP offers formal support for scholarly development in the form of annual research stipends and competitive research grants. In addition to these formal mechanisms, our faculty often take advantage of our program's collegiality to form ongoing, productive writing and reading groups, as well as to arrange more spontaneous opportunities to share work with one another. One of the distinct characteristics of our program is that faculty can discuss their work-in-progress with scholars who can offer a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Our TWP library (located in the front foyer of our building on East Campus) features examples of the scholarship produced by TWP faculty. Please also visit individual faculty webpages to get a further sense of the depth and breadth of TWP faculty scholarship.

SPOTLIGHT: 

BioTAP: A Systematic Approach to Teaching Scientific Writing and Evaluating Undergraduate Theses. BioScience, v59 n10 p896-903 Nov 2009.

Julie Reynolds, Robin Smith, Cary Moskovitz, Amy Sayle

Undergraduate theses and other capstone research projects are standard features of many science curricula, but participation has typically been limited to only the most advanced and highly motivated students. With the recent push to engage more undergraduates in research, some faculty are finding that their typical approach to working with thesis writers is less effective, given the wider diversity of students, or is inefficient, given the higher participation rates. In these situations, a more formal process may be needed to ensure that all students are adequately supported and to establish consistency in how student writers are mentored and assessed. To address this need, we created BioTAP, the Biology Thesis Assessment Protocol, a teaching and assessment tool. BioTAP includes a rubric that articulates departmental expectations for the thesis and a guide to the drafting-feedback-revision process that is modeled after the structure of professional scientific peer review. In this article we (a) describe BioTAP's parts and the rationale behind them, (b) present the results of a study of the rubric's interrater reliability, (c) describe how the development of BioTAP helped us create a faculty learning community, and (d) suggest how other departments and institutions can adapt BioTAP to suit their needs.