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tion or grade that will be assigned to the report. For better or worse (and usually for worse), MIT students can be strongly driven by grades, both as motivators and as indicators of how much time to allocate to any task. These optimizing behaviors add a constraint that is yet another element among a host of social forces that shape the teaching and learning taking place. Learning to Write in Introduction to Experimental Biology and Communication The biology class profiled in this chapter is particularly apt for studying the development of students' identities in apprentice-like settings. Biology is a well-established field and major at MIT (though the laboratory class itself has students exploring relatively new technologies), and instruction in its communication-intensive (CI) courses is geared to teaching students to write up their laboratory work as professional biologists would. This assertion of identity, however, is complicated in the class presented

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

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