A Whole Different Side of Geology: The Science of Reading and Mostly Understanding Scientific Articles for Beginning Geologists

Abstract:

The idea of reading and understanding scientific articles can be daunting to beginning geology students. A student driven question “How do I read a scientific paper?” became the catalyst for a 1-unit special topic course, specifically devoted to the process of reading scientific articles. Five students participated in the course, which focused on research articles pertaining to an upcoming field study in Death Valley. The course was divided into four main portions: locating articles, reading and understand scientific articles, applying of articles in the field, and creating an abstract. Articles were located electronically through the Palomar College library. The first step was to teach students how to navigate databases for the desired material. Part Two was the most challenging and time consuming: the process of reading, analyzing, and comprehending scholarly articles. What made the course interesting was the student driven approach to the articles. Under guidance of an instructor, students worked as a group, navigating two different articles while developing their own strategies to obtain the basic concepts of the article. Each student then had to analyze an additional two articles of their choosing. During this time observations were made on student confidence, methods developed to assist in understanding articles, student challenges and successes.

Information gained from the articles was then applied during a five day field course in Death Valley. Each student gave a brief presentation about the two articles read independently, applying them to various settings in the Death Valley region. Upon returning from the trip, students were tasked with contacting an author from one of the papers. The final portion of the special topic course was for students to produce their own abstracts, requiring them to condense a semester’s worth of work into a short amount of words. From this 1-unit course, students learned there is no one way to read a scientific article, and never is reading an article just once ever enough. It takes multiple readings and multiple analyses before a reader fully comprehends what the writer of the article is discussing. In conclusion this course gave students a foundation in understanding how to read scientific articles.