Reading and extracting relevant information from scientific literature is a skill required in many biology courses. However, students, especially those in lower-level biology courses, struggle with activities involving finding and reading research articles. I designed a multi-week activity to help students in an introductory biology lab course navigate some of the challenging aspects of finding relevant background information from scientific literature. In this activity, students are given a review article and then assigned parts of the article that cover information for one of the background topics needed for a research report. Students work in groups to summarize the information from the review article and find an additional article to summarize from the references cited in their assigned review article. The following week, in lab, each student group presents a short summary of relevant information from both articles to their peers. The goal of the presentations is to provide the class with a short list of articles they can use as resources for the background and significance section of their research report. This activity helps students with the challenge of finding research articles and guides them through the process of determining which parts of an article are relevant to their research project. During the workshop, participants will take on the role of the teaching assistants and discuss how to guide students through this multi-week activity.
Keywords: Scientific literature, Student presentation, Literature review, Novice students
University of California, San Diego (2023)
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