Towards a Mastery Understanding of Critical Reading in Biology: The Use of Highlighting by Students to Assess Their Value Judgment of the Importance of Primary Literature

Abstract

An analysis of critical reading styles of freshmen and senior biology students was compared to that of biology faculty members through the use of highlighting a primary research article. Sentence-by-sentence comparisons were made within each group and the data were analyzed; the composite picture from each group was then compared to the other groups. There appears to be a close agreement of what is deemed important content as judged by faculty but less agreement by seniors and even less agreement by freshmen regarding the value of each line of the text. The results imply that experts in a field appear able to discriminate what is important and valuable in the primary literature and that the novice appears to develop some degree of scientific literacy during his or her undergraduate career.

Expert–Novice Comparison Reveals Pedagogical Implications for Students’ Analysis of Primary Literature

“…Research on how high school, college, and master’s students read research articles has contributed to the understanding of how students view scientific texts. For example, a comparison of the sections of articles that faculty, senior and first-year college students highlight found that faculty had a high level of agreement on important sections of the text, while this agreement decreased for college seniors and even more for college freshmen (Gallo and Rinaldo, 2012). This suggests that, as scientists progress in their careers, they are better able to distinguish important information in scientific articles.…”

From Novice To Expert: An Assessment To Measure Strategies Students Implement While Learning To Read Primary Scientific Literature

“…Data was cleaned to include only data from students completing both the pre-and post-survey (control n = 75; PSL 1 n = 41; PSL2 n = 206; total n = 322), and the pre-data set was used here. The result of the initial analysis of EFA on the items in Table 1 revealed a probable three-factor solution with Oblique (Geomin) Rotation using maximum-likelihood with robust standard errors (MLR) ( 24 ). Additional EFA results are found in Appendix 5.…”

“…The second EFA output showed that 2 items loaded in factor 1 (renamed as summarizing the text) (Appendix 5 and Table 3 ), 3 items loaded in factor 2 (renamed as writing notes from the text) (Appendix 5 and Table 3 ), and 3 items loaded in factor 3 (renamed as finding additional information) (Appendix 5 and Table 3 ). It is more common for a scale to have at least 3 items ( 24 ). However, there are situations in which it is preferable to have only 2, if the variables are highly correlated with one another, but uncorrelated with other variables ( 34 ).…”

“…A more thorough understanding of the development of expertise in the analysis of PSL, including how to measure the progression of becoming an expert, are needed. In general, expert PSL readers value different sections of PSL than novice readers ( 21 , 22 , 24 ). Novice readers tend to avoid figures and data ( 25 ) and place less value on interpreting methods and experimental results than expert readers ( 21 ).…”