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Annotated primary scientific literature: A pedagogical tool for undergraduate courses

• Melissa McCartney

Annotated main scientific literature: A pedagogical tool for undergraduate courses

• Matthew Kararo,
• Melissa McCartney

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• Published: January 9, 2019
• https://doi.org/ten.1371/journal.pbio.3000103

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Abstract

Annotated master scientific literature is a teaching and learning resource that provides scaffolding for undergraduate students acculturating to the accurate scientific practice of obtaining and evaluating information through the medium of primary scientific literature. Utilizing annotated primary scientific literature as an integrated pedagogical tool could enable more widespread apply of master scientific literature in undergraduate science classrooms with minimal disruption to existing syllabi. Research is ongoing to make up one's mind an optimal implementation protocol, with these preliminary iterations presented here serving as a first expect at how students answer to annotated chief scientific literature. The undergraduate biological science student participants in our study did not, in general, have an abundance of experience reading primary scientific literature; however, they found the annotations useful, specially for vocabulary and graph interpretation. We present here an implementation protocol for using annotated primary literature in the classroom that minimizes the use of valuable classroom time and requires no additional pedagogical training for instructors.

Citation: Kararo Thousand, McCartney K (2019) Annotated primary scientific literature: A pedagogical tool for undergraduate courses. PLoS Biol 17(one): e3000103. https://doi.org/10.1371/periodical.pbio.3000103

Published: Jan 9, 2019

Copyright: © 2019 Kararo, McCartney. This is an open up access article distributed nether the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original writer and source are credited.

Funding: This research was supported through National Scientific discipline Foundation Sectionalization of Undergraduate Pedagogy 1525596 (MM) and Florida International University Higher of Arts, Sciences & Pedagogy Postdoctoral Fellowship (MM and MK). The funders had no part in study design, data drove and analysis, decision to publish, or training of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors take declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: CREATE, consider, read, elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and think of the adjacent experiment; FIU, Florida International Academy; SitC, Scientific discipline in the Classroom; Stalk, science, engineering, engineering, and math; TOSLS, Test of Scientific Literacy Skills

Provenance: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Background

A major output of public enquiry universities is primary scientific literature, in addition to educating students and conferring degrees. It is imperative for researchers and universities to increment the transparency and outreach of the primary research literature they produce. Yet, about primary scientific literature remains unknown and/or inaccessible to the public, because it is published in journals targeting academics in the same field and is oftentimes placed behind periodical paywalls [ane].

Public research universities also have a responsibility to produce scientifically literate graduates [ii,iii]. Many students graduate without an understanding of scientific practices and an acculturation to interpreting scientific communication, especially primary scientific literature [4,5]. One way to potentially better scientific literacy overall and develop specific skills, such as interpreting scientific communication, is to incorporate primary scientific literature into the undergraduate curricula and provide pedagogical tools that may help bridge the split up betwixt everyday language and the language used by experts [half-dozen–11].

The written report of primary scientific literature every bit a pedagogical tool in undergraduate biology courses has led to innovative approaches. The most well-known of these may exist the Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Clarify and translate the information, and Think of the next Experiment (CREATE) method, in which kinesthesia redesign their existing courses around primary scientific literature in order to provide an intensive and comprehensive analysis of primary scientific literature for undergraduates [vi,12–14]. Although this type of a semester-long innovative elective course provided educatee benefits, adding an entire course to a caste sequence may prove hard and by definition, does non impact students that choose non to include them in an already credit-crunched plan of written report. This credit-crunch is specially prevalent at institutions such every bit the one in this study, Florida International University (FIU), where whatsoever additional credit hours are charged at out-of-state tuition rates. Therefore, it would benefit biology didactics, and biological science equally a discipline, to develop innovative ways to utilize principal scientific literature as a pedagogical tool, ideally with a minimal bear on to existing plans of study and time investment from class instructors.

A growing body of research shows that less-intensive interventions using primary scientific literature can be valuable and useful in scientific discipline, engineering, engineering, and math (STEM) education, with the greatest amount of inquiry happening at the undergraduate level. Programs include journal clubs, data and effigy exploration, and tutorials on how to read primary scientific literature [15–17]. Assessment tools used to evaluate these interventions are as as diverse, ranging from rubrics to validated surveys [18,19].

Annotated master scientific literature

Annotated master scientific literature is designed to help readers interpret complex science past overlaying additional information on a scientific enquiry article. Preserving the original text and its context is what makes annotated principal scientific research literature unique from other genres that alter or rewrite the original text. This preservation is the key deviation between annotated primary scientific literature and adjusted primary literature, an arroyo that takes portions of primary scientific literature and rewrites the original content to plough them into pedagogical tools [xx]. Science in the Classroom (SitC; world wide web.scienceintheclassroom.org) is a highly developed and sophisticated instance of annotated primary scientific literature that nosotros decided has potential for classroom pedagogical use.

SitC, a collection of freely available annotated papers, aims to make master scientific inquiry literature more accessible to students and educators. The repository of annotated master scientific literature manufactures is accessible to educators and searchable by keyword, classified by topics, and grouped in collections. The process of reading and deconstructing scientific literature in undergraduate courses has been shown to effect in students potentially gaining an understanding of scientific practices, such as how scientists design their experiments and present their results, substantially assuasive students to experience the logic behind drawing conclusions from a set of information [half dozen,vii,12–fourteen].

Annotated principal scientific literature uses the original text of enquiry articles along with a "Learning Lens" overlay, designed to provide students tools to utilize for interpretation. The "Learning Lens" is used to selectively highlight different parts of the text and is composed of seven headings: Glossary, Previous work, Author's experiments, Conclusions, News and policy links, Connect to learning standards, and References and notes, which are color-coded to match the corresponding text of the inquiry article. For case, an annotated glossary term, when clicked on, will produce a popular-upwards box containing the definition of the discussion (Fig 1). Annotations independent inside the "Learning Lens" accept been designed to be at the reading comprehension level of a first-year undergraduate educatee, and ongoing evaluation efforts have provided evidence that this goal is being met [21].

Annotated principal literature as a pedagogical tool

Annotations provide an educational scaffold that could aid students become more comfortable with reading scientific papers. We suggest annotated main scientific literature as an example of a resource that can exist incorporated into existing courses and provide scaffolding that may assistance undergraduate students develop skills necessary to read chief scientific literature while requiring a minimal time investment from instructors. Using annotated main scientific literature equally a pedagogical tool non only could potentially help universities develop scientifically literate graduates, merely it may also broaden the impact of master scientific inquiry literature produced by faculty.

The previously mentioned pedagogical tools and curriculum transformations can require a substantial investment of time and try from the university, faculty, and staff. Therefore, additional tools and opportunities should exist considered in guild to achieve a wider variety of complementary opportunities for pedagogy with authentic scientific practices and engaging students in reading primary scientific literature [22]. We hypothesize that the incorporation of annotated principal scientific literature in the classroom represents one of these opportunities.

In this pilot study, nosotros had a goal of developing an implementation protocol that could comprise annotated primary scientific literature into undergraduate courses with a minimal time investment for instructors and minimal disruption and alteration to existing courses and plans of written report.

Implementation of annotated principal scientific literature

All data were collected in accordance with an approved FIU Institutional Review Board protocol #17–0398 and #17–0105. Our initial attempts to develop an implementation protocol for using annotated main scientific literature as a pedagogical tool had the educational goal of introducing students to the "Learning Lens" annotations and observing how instructors and students used the tool. Initial attempts to incorporate annotated primary scientific literature focused on undergraduate biological science courses at FIU, including Full general Biology 2, Ecology, and Establish Life History. The implementation sessions were run iteratively during the same semester, ensuring that students did not overlap, and each class had only 1 implementation session. We describe two variations of our implementations here.

Students involved in the study self-reported their major, with 76% beingness biology majors. We did not collect whatsoever data on students' prior noesis of biological science, but the majority of students in these classes are first- or 2nd-year students.

Nosotros used the same annotated piece of primary scientific literature for all in-class activities described in this study: "Caffeine in floral nectar enhances a pollinator's retention of reward" (https://tinyurl.com/k7m329g). We chose an commodity that incorporated many different aspects of biology, including development, ecosystem interactions, basic botany, learning and memory, and animal behavior in a single written report, making this paper applicable in a wide variety of undergraduate courses.

The objectives were to introduce undergraduate students to annotated chief scientific literature and collect baseline data on how students interacted with the annotations themselves. The first implementation involved a one-time intervention, connected to the student's coursework, conducted by the researchers and began with an approximately five-minute orientation to annotated master scientific literature. This orientation included how to use the "Learning Lens" and a brief overview of the importance of main scientific literature. Students were then given 20 minutes to read the selected piece of annotated master scientific literature. At the 20-minute fourth dimension point, a Qualtrics (online survey software; Provo, Utah and Seattle, Washington) link was provided, and if they were done reading, students could brainstorm answering the feedback questionnaire. Students were given an additional xx minutes to complete the questionnaire. Collecting and analyzing this offset round of pilot data allowed for reflection on opportunities for iterative comeback.

In improver to the questionnaire data, feedback was collected through in-class activity observations conducted by the researchers. We kept detailed field notes indicating when students appeared on task, i.e., independently interacting with annotated primary scientific literature. We also noted when alternative tasks were observed, i.e., students checking email or social media, and when task completion appeared to have occurred. During the implementation, our in-class observations estimated an boilerplate fourth dimension on task, i.e., interacting with annotated primary scientific literature, to be 10 minutes, because there was a noticeable increase in classroom noise after this time point. We confirmed this by using Adobe Analytics (Adobe, San Jose, California), which measures the fourth dimension spent on a website by each user. We measured an average fourth dimension spent on annotated main scientific literature of 13 minutes. Due to limitations of Adobe Analytics, we are unable to collect individual information points and were limited to an aggregate boilerplate for the entire class. Note that the difference betwixt the observed fourth dimension spent on the action and the digital measure out can be explained by Adobe Analytics averaging all participants' time spent on the commodity page.

The main student feedback was collected through a questionnaire containing both quantitative (content questions) and qualitative items (i.e., "what did you similar nigh this activity?"). One of the key ideas we garnered from the qualitative data was that a onetime intervention was perceived by students as somewhat discordant when a connection between the commodity they read and the content they were covering at the time in their course was not fabricated explicit by their course instructor (Tabular array 1).

When asked if the topic of the paper related to their course, students in this iteration gave feedback such as this activity was "only slightly relevant to the course," and "no, we['re] studying plants" despite the article being explicitly about caffeine production by plants in order to concenter pollinators. Additionally, we were uncertain that we had continued with the students as researchers in the same way as the instructor with whom the students had built a relationship.

Although some students may have not perceived a connectedness betwixt the article content and their grade content, in general, students found the annotations useful, especially regarding graphs and vocabulary estimation. Examples of educatee responses can be seen in Tabular array 2.

For our second iteration, we decided to accost the issues of students feeling discordant by having the class instructors introduce the article and annotated chief scientific literature action themselves. Additionally, we asked instructors to explicitly connect the annotated paper to current grade content. With both of these procedures in identify, the boilerplate time students engaged with the annotated article, as measured by Adobe Analytics, increased to xix minutes (Fig 2).

This new implementation, in which the instructor introduced the slice of annotated principal scientific literature and annotated primary scientific literature activeness, not only appeared to increase the time that students engaged with the material, but information technology likewise removed the manpower requirement for the researchers to be present in every classroom in social club to draw and implement the action. This could let for a more widespread implementation of annotated primary scientific literature as a pedagogical tool. It was also apparent that students introduced to the activity by their course teacher were more readily able to recognize the connections between reading primary scientific research literature and their course content, which can be seen in pupil responses in Tabular array 3.

When asked if the topic of the newspaper related to their course, students in this iteration stated "This article related to 3 different courses I am taking this semester," "yes it most certainly did," "aye! Nosotros're learning about pollination," and that "…scientific papers on new experiments …are important."

During the initial iterations of the implementation protocol, students read the annotated articles and completed an cess during class time. Nonetheless, a growing concern was feasibility of an in-class assignment due to the time requirement and assuasive for instructor flexibility in scheduling. While observing a senior lecturer at FIU, who was non involved in this current study, and his existing implementation method of students reading primary scientific literature as homework and answering iClicker questions at the commencement of the post-obit class, the researchers noticed an increased enthusiasm amidst the students during the class discussion. Supporting this observation, the history of research on the use of clickers in the classroom shows an increase in feelings of class involvement [23] and learning gains in students [24]. Because of the observations and support from instructors, the conclusion was made to prefer the homework protocol moving forwards with futurity implementations. The homework protocol allows for more instructor liberty in selecting manufactures relevant to course content, reduces the class time required for implementation, and separates content questions from a pre–post attitude and motivation questionnaire. Using manufactures as homework also allows for instructors to utilize as many articles equally they wish, merely for this project moving forward, in future implementations, we volition require a minimum of three manufactures over the grade of a semester. We are currently piloting an implementation protocol using annotated primary scientific literature as a homework consignment and are excited to run across how instructors and students use annotated primary scientific literature moving forward.

Advice to others

In the ongoing iterative development of an implementation protocol for annotated chief scientific literature, the most fruitful do has been reflection. This is bang-up do for any educator or educational researcher during the curriculum or pedagogical tool evolution procedure. Reflection on early classroom implementations helped u.s. identify the opportunities for improvement in our subsequent protocol iterations and allowed the states to brand modifications based upon quantitative, qualitative, and observational information. One example of changes coming from reflection was noticing that during an implementation, students were opening the assessment without reading the article and using the "find" feature within the article to find answers to cess questions. This led to preventing entry into the assessment until the time for reading had elapsed. Our subsequent classroom observations showed united states of america that this forced students to interact with the commodity and be more thoughtful nigh their answers to the assessment, i.e., answers were non cutting-and-pasted from the article text. We propose others to keep this practice of thoughtful reflection when using annotated main scientific literature as a pedagogical tool. We also welcome any feedback or alternative uses of annotated primary scientific literature.

Future steps

The latest annotated primary scientific literature implementation protocol iteration is beingness airplane pilot tested during fall 2018. Focusing more than on robust evaluation now that implementation obstacles accept been overcome will allow us to determine the effectiveness of annotated primary scientific literature as a pedagogical tool in undergraduate biology classrooms. Future studies are being designed to examine students' scientific literacy before and after completing the annotated article activities using a previously validated scientific literacy musical instrument (Test of Scientific Literacy Skills [TOSLS]) [two]. Additionally, we aim to measure students' subjective task values with regards to reading chief scientific research literature [25–28], equally well every bit their main scientific literature reading self-efficacy [29–32].

We hope to spread the word about annotated primary scientific literature and investigate its potential impacts on student learning and motivation as nosotros farther refine our implementation protocol and propagate beyond our section and institution.

Acknowledgments

We thank Beth Ruedi and Shelby Lake at AAAS, and Rebecca Vieyra for help editing this manuscript, our FIU colleagues Richard Brinn, Ligia Collado-Vides, Sat Gavassa, John Geiger, Camila Granados-Cifuentes, Zahra Hazari, Suzanne Koptur, and Sparkle Malone for providing united states with class time, and all the participating students at FIU.

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