The intellectual development of an undergraduate interested in pursuing a career in the sciences necessitates that they become adept at reading, comprehending, and evaluating complex primary literature. The development of these skills is a long-term process. Therefore, an early start in familiarizing the students with research literature is essential. The principal aim of this project is to create curriculum materials and activities for the honors general chemistry courses designed to help students develop the ability to read and interpret primary literature. Over one semester, students are given five literature assignments.  Each assignment consists of one secondary journal article and four closely associated pre-assigned primary journal articles. Students begin by rank ordering the original research articles in terms of relatedness to the secondary article. Then students investigate the fundamental aspects of the research papers, such as identifying hypotheses, goals, main conclusions from the experiments, and future directions. Students are also required to provide a rationale for each answer. Students are encouraged to discuss and pair up with their classmates to complete each assignment. Two literature reading workshops, held during the regularly scheduled course recitation, during the semester, address student questions on primary literature reading methods and give feedback on the assignment objectives. The undergraduates get feedback on each assignment right after the respective submissions. The feedback format is to highlight and give annotated explanations in the specific regions on the research papers. The students learn to identify the hypothesis, the research objectives and type of research, the conclusions, and future direction.  In total, students read five subsequent articles, and 20 research articles to varying levels of detail, similar to how researchers read and analyze scientific papers. Pre and post student opinion surveys show the progress of the learning curve of each student from the beginning to the end of the semester.  Assignment scores are also analyzed to determine skill improvement over the two semesters. Data analysis of the assignment worksheets, opinion surveys, and workshops will be discussed, highlighting the implication and future directions of this project. The discussion will include the significance of this undergraduate research, and how the students going through this intervention acquire the skill to recognize and comprehend academic research.

Developing primary research literature reading comprehension skills in first year undergraduates

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

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