Introducing Undergraduates to Primary Research Literature

Abstract

All students pursuing STEM careers need to be adept at interpreting and evaluating primary research literature. The complexity of research articles requires significant practice and training in order to become skilled and efficient at this process. Thus, an early start in undergraduate education is essential and allows for development and practice through subsequent coursework and undergraduate research. The project presented here was an effort to develop fundamental literacy skills for a first semester honors general chemistry course. The curriculum included five iterative guided worksheet assignments comprising one secondary article and four related primary research articles. Each subsequent assignment was designed to be more challenging, by selecting more complicated articles and subjects, to encourage and increase literature assessment skills. Two workshops were presented after the first and third assignments to provide formal instruction on strategies to effectively read and understand research literature and promote discussion on the literature assignment articles. Assignment performance was consistently strong throughout the semester as the complexity of the assignments increased for three of the four learning objectives. However, students struggled with identifying research hypotheses despite direct instruction on this learning objective during both workshops. Pre- and post-semester survey data indicated that, while students came to the course with fairly strong confidence in their abilities to interpret and evaluate research literature, they also indicated very strong improvement in these skills by the end of the semester. These results indicate that this one-semester curriculum was an effective means to introduce students to scientific literature and develop basic literacy skills.