USING A NATURAL DISASTERS COURSE TO TEACH STUDENTS HOW TO EFFECTIVELY READ PRIMARY LITERATURE

The ability to read, understand, and evaluate articles from the primary literature are skills that help science students as they progress through their undergraduate degrees, and into a graduate program and/or professional life. Therefore, it’s important to not only teach students how to read these articles, but how to interpret the contents. A natural disasters course is an excellent setting for students to learn how to read primary literature because of our innate fascination with catastrophe and our general understanding of processes associated with how and why they occur, thereby negating the need for lectures.

This course, taught during the summer semester, dealt with a different natural disaster topic daily. Students were presented with pre-selected journal articles and were asked to choose which paper they would like to read, thereby giving them the chance to choose a paper that satisfied their particular interest. The following day, students that chose the same paper spent the first 15 minutes of class in small groups discussing the important points of the article and preparing to share a 20-minute summary with their peers that had not read the same article. We found that sitting around one large table, versus individual desks, helped foster healthy discussion and debate amongst the groups. The students then graded the article for interest, difficulty of reading, and use in future classes before the next group began their summary. Finally, students were required to write a QRS (questions, response, summary) paper, which showed them how reading primary literature generates questions that spur further research.

An end-of-course evaluation indicated that this method of instruction helped point out some important facets of the readings that they may not have understood, or that they had overlooked. Further, students across the board stated that the techniques used in this course increased both their comfort and confidence with reading journal articles.