Students Reading Real Science

Part of my Teaching Philosophy is that student interest drives learning. Using primary literature in the classroom is a good way to teach about the nature of science and generate interest amongst students who are interested in becoming scientists and/or going to graduate school. In 2015, I took a 6 week class through the CIRTL network about how to utilize scientific articles in undergraduate science courses. We learned about methods, such as C.R.E.A.T.E, that others have used for teaching primary literature, and each student in the class developed annotations and a teacher's guide for an article from Science. The resources for teaching these articles and many others are available on the Science in the Classroom website.

The article I annotated is titled "Sunlight controls water column processing of carbon in arctic fresh waters" and was written by Rose M. Cory, Collin P. Ward, Byron C. Crump, and George W. Kling (published in 2014). The title I chose for the annotated version of the article is "Midnight Sun: Contributing to Global Warming?". The article describes experiments conducted to determine the relative importance of sunlight and microbes in the degradation of dissolved organic carbon that is being released by melting permafrost in the arctic. While the paper itself, like most primary literature, is quite technical, it has a lot of connections to concepts that are likely to be taught in an undergraduate environmental science, climate science, or chemistry course such as global warming, the carbon cycle, photochemistry, bacterial respiration, and combining data from molecular scale and field scale experiments into environmental models. You can see the final version of my annotated article here and the teacher's guide I developed here. Below you can see a figure that I made to explain some of the terms used in the paper.

As part of the course, I also helped plan a project for evaluating the usefulness of the annotations in the classroom. We created a survey designed for students who read one of the annotated articles as part of a course that included questions about the student's previous experience with scientific literature, the length of time spent reading the annotated article, perceived understanding of the article, and how the annotations were important to the student's understanding of the article.

Reflection

While developing the article annotations, teacher's guide, and evaluation survey, I drew heavily on the skills I learned in previous teaching and outreach projects - especially the language skills I learned when studying science journalism and the teaching-as-research mindset that drove the organization of my Native Plant Lab exploration station and development of my Chloride in Local Water Samples lab for Madison College. Writing the annotations was also a reflective experience - what kind of annotations would make the paper easier for me to read? What would have been useful when I was an undergraduate? What resources will I want available as an instructor? I will utilize primary literature when I teach courses in the future, and I think the Science in the Classroom annotations are a fantastic resource.