Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students are often encouraged to maximize their engagement with supervised research and minimize teaching obligations. However, the process of teaching students engaged in inquiry provides practice in the application of important research skills. Using a performance rubric, we compared the quality of methodological skills demonstrated in written research proposals for two groups of early career graduate students (those with both teaching and research responsibilities and those with only research responsibilities) at the beginning and end of an academic year. After statistically controlling for preexisting differences between groups, students who both taught and conducted research demonstrate significantly greater improvement in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses and design valid experiments. These results indicate that teaching experience can contribute substantially to the improvement of essential research skills.

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Instruction on problem solving in particular domains typically relies on explanations from experts about their strategies. However, research indicates that such self-reports often are incomplete or inaccurate (e.g., Chao & Salvendy, 1994;Cooke & Breedin, 1994). This article evaluates research on experts' cognition, the accuracy of experts' self-reports, and the efficacy of instruction based on experts' self-reports. Analysis of this evidence indicates that experts' free recall of strategies introduces errors and omissions into instructional materials that hinder student success. In contrast, when experts engage in structured knowledge elicitation techniques (e.g., cognitive task analysis), the resultant instruction is more effective. Based on these findings, the article provides a theoretical explanation of experts' self-report errors and discusses implications for the continued improvement of instructional design processes.

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A national sample of female PhD students logged significantly more hours conducting research than their male counterparts. However, males were 15% more likely to be listed as authors on journal articles per 100 hours of research time, reflecting inequality on an essential metric of scholarly productivity that directly impacts competitiveness for academic positions.

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Existing literature provides insight into the nature and extent of plagiarism amongst undergraduate students (e.g., Ellery, 2008; Parameswaran & Devi, 2006; Selwyn, 2008). Plagiarism amongst graduate students is relatively unstudied, however, and the existing data are largely based on self-reports. This study investigated the rates and potential causes of plagiarism amongst graduate students in master's and doctoral programmes in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and science or mathematics education by examining actual research proposals written by graduate students. Results indicate that plagiarism is a prevalent issue at each of the three university sites sampled and across all of the investigated disciplines. Fine grained analyses suggest that this plagiarism may be largely unintentional and due to a lack of disciplinary enculturation. Specifically, participants that plagiarised had approximately one less semester of research experience than graduate students who did not plagiarise. Furthermore, participants who lacked primary literature in their research proposals were significantly more likely to plagiarise and often used inappropriate citation styles. Follow-up correspondence with participants indicates that participants plagiarised, in part, because they lacked an awareness of the role of primary literature in the research process. This suggests that explicit training in the role and use of primary literature may provide an opportunity for programmes or mentors to accelerate the development of graduate students' research skills. This study also revealed that plagiarism was more common amongst English as a Second Language (ESL) participants. Potential causes of plagiarism and solutions to address plagiarism among the ESL population will be discussed. This paper is based on an earlier version presented at The Center for Academic Integrity 2009 Annual International Conference.

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