I’m not quite done with this semester, but I’m also starting to think about the courses that I’m teaching in the winter. In particular, I’m thinking about our department writing course. The course is in transition right now – in the past, it’s been a writing-in-the-discipline course, but because of state-mandated changes to our general education program, students now have to take more outside-the-discipline writing courses (and the disciplinary writing courses are disappearing). We’re not getting rid of the course completely, because we’ve also been using it to prepare students for their senior thesis work. But the focus of the course is changing, from perfecting the writing to putting together a good thesis proposal.
Our students take this course at the end of their junior year, after they’ve taken a lot of geology courses but before they start doing research for their senior thesis. When I started teaching the course, I hoped that the process of writing a proposal would help reduce the sense of panic that undergraduates can experience when they’re first told “and now, you have to do something totally new – good luck!” But it didn’t help – it just pushed the panic back a semester. Current seniors regularly tell the juniors that they need to decide on their project before they go into the writing class. So I need a different approach.
I’m considering starting the class by emphasizing reading papers – one paper per student per week for the first five weeks of class. I’m thinking about ways to make sure that students do the work, but which don’t force me to read 22 papers every week. Right now, I’m leaning towards three assignments: a short written response each week (graded done/not done), a presentation and discussion of one of the papers in class (graded using some kind of simple, in-class rubric), and a short graded paper on one of the articles (possibly modeled after some of the better blog posts about peer-reviewed research).
That’s all fine and good, but I’ve never been very good at getting ideas from reading the literature myself. So I’ve been trying to figure out what I should be getting out of articles. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
- What did the authors conclude?
- What alternate conceptual models, explanations, or hypotheses did the authors consider? Why did they prefer the explanation in their conclusion?
- What methods did they use to approach the problem? (A few possibilities in the geosciences could be various numerical modeling approaches, sampling strategies, analytical techniques, ways of plotting field data, experiments…)
- What’s the context? How does this work fit with other work that’s been done and questions being asked? Why does anyone care about this research?
Getting ideas for future work:
- Do you accept the author’s conclusions? If not, are there other approaches that could allow you to test their conclusion?
- Does this research suggest new ways to interpret a different problem? (Could something like this model explain other areas? Other periods of time? Other types of processes?)
- Are there other problems that could be studied using the same methods? (And what equipment or expertise is necessary to use these methods?)
Here’s where I need some help. What am I missing? Is it really cheesy to steal my “basics” from the structure of a scientific paper? (I mean, all I’ve done is asked students to think about the paper backwards.) What kinds of questions do you find yourself asking when you read papers – especially when you get really productive ideas from reading a paper? (“What the &*^#^@ were the editors THINKING when they accepted this stinking pile of &*#%#” is not the kind of thought that inspires new research. At least, not for me.)