Reading Primary Scientific Literature: Approaches for Teaching Students in the Undergraduate STEM Classroom

Zotero as a teaching tool for independent study courses, honors contracts, and undergraduate research mentoring

Managing and evaluating the literature review process can be a time-consuming challenge when working one-on-one with students to teach scientific process skills, whether through an independent study, honors contract, or undergraduate research. In this article, I share my solution to address the pedagogical and organizational challenge posed by this type of teaching and mentoring: the citation management software Zotero used in conjunction with a template worksheet. Overall, this approach will save time, introduce students to a new multipurpose software tool, and lead to a set of reusable resources for future teaching.

Fostering student authorship skills in synthetic biology

Women and racial minorities are underrepresented in the synthetic biology community. Developing a scholarly identity by engaging in a scientific community through writing and communication is an important component for STEM retention, particularly for underrepresented individuals. Several excellent pedagogical tools have been developed to teach scientific literacy and to measure competency in reading and interpreting scientific literature. However, fewer tools exist to measure learning gains with respect to writing, or that teach the more abstract processes of peer review and scientific publishing, which are essential for developing scholarly identity and publication currency. Here we describe our approach to teaching scientific writing and publishing to undergraduate students within a synthetic biology course. Using gold standard practices in project-based learning, we created a writing project in which students became experts in a specific application area of synthetic biology with relevance to an important global problem or challenge. To measure learning gains associated with our learning outcomes, we adapted and expanded the Student Attitudes, Abilities, and Beliefs (SAAB) concept inventory to include additional questions about the process of scientific writing, authorship, and peer review. Our results suggest the project-based approach was effective in achieving the learning objectives with respect to writing and peer reviewed publication, and resulted in high student satisfaction and student self-reported learning gains. We propose that these educational practices could contribute directly to the development of scientific identity of undergraduate students as synthetic biologists, and will be useful in creating a more diverse synthetic biology research enterprise.

Teaching Synaptic Transmission Using Primary Literature: A Skills-Focused Pedagogical Approach

Neuroscience is a burgeoning and intensive undergraduate major at many institutions of higher education and several areas in neuroscience education need further development. One such needed development is an increased focus on the procurement of career-relevant skills in addition to the traditional acquisition of subject knowledge. Skill development is particularly challenging in neuroscience education as the subject's interdisciplinary nature provides an atypically broad range of potential careers for graduates. Skills common to many careers in neuroscience include the ability to understand and analyze quantitative data and to draw conclusions based on those analyses. Here is presented an active learning pedagogical approach involving the analysis of seminal articles in the primary scientific literature to provide practice in analyzing data and drawing conclusions from those data while at the same time learning the fundamental tenets of synaptic transmission. Articles were selected that highlight principles such as the role of Ca2+ in synaptic release, exocytosis, quantal release, and synaptic delay. Figures from these articles that can readily be used to teach these principles were selected, and questions that can help to guide students' analysis of the data are also suggested. Activities like this are needed in greater numbers to facilitate the process of helping students gain skills relevant to a productive career in neuroscience.

Postsecondary biology students' ways of participating in the critique and discussion of primary scientific literature

Science advances through the interplay of idea construction and idea critique. Our goal was to describe varied forms of productive disciplinary engagement that emerged during primary literature discussions. Such descriptions are necessary for biology educators and researchers to design for and recognize diverse repertoires of participation in the critique and discussion of primary scientific literature. We identified three cases (a lower-division ecology course, an upper-division organismal course, and a journal club embedded in a summer research program) that were each designed with weekly primary literature discussions. We analyzed 12 discussions (four from each case) to describe what postsecondary students attend to when they critique and what forms of participation emerged from students reading and discussing primary scientific literature. Students participated in critique in all three cases and patterns in the substance and framing of critiques reflected the level of the context (lower- or upper-division). Students also shaped how they participated in ways that were relevant to the science classroom communities in each case. Our findings suggest that structuring primary literature discussions in ways that both elevate and connect students' agency and personal relevance is important for fostering varied forms of productive disciplinary engagement within a science classroom community.