2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How can students in science and engineering fields obtain authentic practice in technical writing? This paper presents the author’s experience instructing a writing-intensive experimental physics class structured as a mock journal entitled Physics in Progress. Offered in an intensive three-week format, the course centered on the students’ creation of three ‘rapid communication’ contributions and one ‘scientific article.’ Students engaged in the peer review process, writing referee reports and even issuing editorial decisions on the acceptance of their peers work to the journal. This paper will discuss the successes and pitfalls of the course structure, steps that could be taken to mitigate the workload overhead of coordinating the peer review process, and the impact of the course structure on student motivation. Overall, the students’ increased identification as scientists raised the stakes of instruction in experimental methods, laboratory and publishing ethics, and technical writing. This increase in identification as a professional scientist or engineer helps the students to gain authentic practice in these skills in a controlled environment and build their confidence for when these skills are needed in their future careers. The publicly available end product of the course, now published online as Physics in Progress issue 1, served as a motivating factor and now serves as a time capsule containing writing artifacts that students take pride in and can be shared in portfolios or as otherwise appropriate.