Course:
Professor: Chris Gillen, Assistant Professor of Biology
Librarian: Jasmine Vaughan, Librarian and Technology Consultant
Project description
In the biology introductory laboratory (Biology 109) and in many of our non-majors courses, an important pedagogical objective is to teach students how to read the primary scientific literature. This ability is essential for those students who will go on in science, and it is also very important for those who will not continue in the sciences. In today's world, almost everyone is faced with the need to interpret scientific work and make decisions based on scientific information. These may range from decisions about the health care of a loved one, the proper nutritional supplement to take, or whether to invest in a biotech firm.
The ability to read and understand the primary scientific literature is probably the most important step towards evaluating scientific information. Relying on secondary reports can be unsatisfactory. Furthermore, properly understanding and interpreting secondary reports requires some experience with reading and evaluating primary literature. Although exposing students to the primary scientific literature is a laudable objective, reading primary scientific papers is an extremely difficult process.
Thus, the aim of this proposal is to develop information literacy tutorials that explicitly teach students how to read the primary literature in biology.
The pedagogical objectives addressed by this proposal are already being pursued in many of our non-majors courses (including Biol 105) and also in our introductory lab, a course for biology majors. Currently, students in these classes are already expected to read and understand primary literature. For example, in Biology 105, students are expected to write a short position paper that uses the primary scientific literature to explore a question in exercise or health biology. See http://ww w2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Biology/courses/biol105/html/biol105cri.html for a detailed description of this project.
However, our current model for teaching students to read papers is not entirely satisfactory. In written assignments we often find errors that reflect student's inability to properly understand the scientific literature. For example, students often fail to differentiate between the primary data that is presented in a paper and the comments that authors make about other studies. This is essentially a deficiency in information literacy. Students fail to properly understand the format and conventions of the primary literature and this failure impairs their ability to analyze the literature.
Learning how to properly read the scientific literature requires on-going practice. A single lecture-style explanation will not suffice. Clearly, a hands-on interactive instruction method, such as a tutorial, will be more effective for the students than a one-time lecture. The purp ose of the proposed work is to develop tutorials that enable us to more effectively and efficiently teach the needed skills, especially in classes with large numbers of students.
Outline of proposed tutorials
Tutorials will be designed to address several different aspects of reading a scientific paper, each aspect represented by a question that a reader might be asking.
Each tutorial will have two parts:
An explanatory portion that leads students through an explanation about how to read a certain
part of a paper.
An interactive portion that asks students to answer questions that test their ability to read a paper.
This section will be in the form of an interactive multiple choice quiz. Feedback wi ll be provided
for both correct and incorrect answers on the multiple choice quiz allowing students to learn from
their mistakes.
Implementation
In Biology of Exercise, teaching students to read scientific papers is a major pedagogical objective, with several full class periods devoted towards reading papers. Thus, the tutorials will be used in very close association with material being covered in class. The procedure will be to introduce students to the important concepts in class, have students work through the tutorials outside of class, and then to have a class discussion about the material at a later date.
The mechanism of implementation in Biology 109 is less clear, especially because this course involves the collaboration of many biology faculty members. However, one week in Biology 109 is devoted to an information literacy session, and implementation of the tutorial during that session would be synergistic with the course goals.
Timeline
Preliminary planning of the tutorials will begin with meetings between Chris Gillen and Jasmine Vaughan during spring 2002 with the objective of developing specific plans for the content of the tutorials. Actual development of the tutorials will begin during the summer of 2002 with a pilot version of the project ready for test implementation in courses during the 2002-2003 academic year.
Tutorials 2, 3, 5 and 6 form the most important modules in the proposal. Thus, work during spring an d summer 2002 will focus first on those tutorials with the goal of having the four most important tutorials ready for preliminary implementation in 2002-2003.
We will administer a survey to test the effectiveness of the tutorials during the 2002-2003 academic year. Based on this feedback, we will modify the tutorials during the summer of 2003. Thus, primary work on this project will occur during the summers of 2002 and 2003 with some ongoing work during the 2002-2003 academic year.