Exploring the Impact of Collaborative Writing on Student Engagement and Scientific Ability Development in an ISLE Approach High School Physics Classroom

National organizations such as AAPT and NGSS set goals of engaging students in experimentation and authentic scientific reasoning in the classroom. In Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach classrooms, students participate in the practices of scientists on a daily basis. They design and carry out observational, testing, and application experiments and write up their findings as laboratory reports. A key element of the ISLE approach is fostering a scientific community among students. Given the expectation of collaborative lab work, it is a natural extension to have students collaborate writing up their findings. Building these skills can serve as preparation for future careers as scientists and researchers, where co-authoring papers, grants, and presentations is common. Despite the benefits of collaboration, K-12 educators typically require students to write up their findings individually. Thus, there is a need to explore the realities of student collaboration during lab report writing, including workload distribution and accountability. This talk examines how first-year high school physics students collaboratively report on their findings from investigations. Through a quantitative analysis of the revision history of their Google Documents, we tracked individual student contributions to laboratory reports. This allowed us to explore correlations between involvement in the collaborative writing process and the development of scientific abilities. Knowing which abilities students consistently contribute to can help teachers model and scaffold expectations that support a more balanced development of these practices.