title: Practice makes pretty good: assessment of primary literature reading abilities across multiple large-enrollment biology laboratory courses.
abstract: Primary literature is essential for scientific communication and is commonly utilized in undergraduate biology education. Despite this, there is often little time spent training our students how to critically analyze a paper. To address this, we introduced a primary literature module in multiple upper-division laboratory courses. In this module, instructors conduct classroom discussions that dissect a paper as researchers do. While previous work has identified classroom interventions that improve primary literature comprehension within a single course, our goal was to determine whether including a scientific paper module in our classes could produce long-term benefits. On the basis of performance in an assessment exam, we found that our module resulted in longitudinal gains, including increased comprehension and critical-thinking abilities in subsequent lab courses. These learning gains were specific to courses utilizing our module, as no longitudinal gains were seen in students who had taken other upper-division labs that lacked extensive primary literature discussion. In addition, we assessed whether performance on our assessment correlated with a variety of factors, including grade point average, course performance, research background, and self-reported confidence in understanding of the article. Furthermore, all of the study conclusions are independent of biology disciplines, as we observe similar trends within each course.
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 bsato@uci.edu.
authors.forename: Brian K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Sato
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Pavan
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kadandale
authors.affiliation: Department of Education, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Wenliang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Paige M N
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Murata
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Yama
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Latif
authors.affiliation: *Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Warschauer
mesh_terms: D001695:Biology / Q000193:education*; D003142:Communication; D003479:Curriculum; D004521:Educational Measurement; D017145:Models, Educational; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000592:standards; D011932:Reading; D012044:Regression Analysis; D014495:Universities