CREATE a Revolution in Undergraduates' Understanding of Science: Teach through Close Analysis of Scientific Literature

Abstract

The teaching of science to undergraduates aligns poorly with the practice of science, leading many students to conclude that research is boring and researchers themselves are antisocial geniuses. Creativity, a key driver of scientific progress, is underemphasized or ignored altogether in many classrooms, as teaching focuses on the complex integrated concepts and voluminous amounts of information typical of STEM curricula. Faculty, largely untrained in science education per se, teach largely as they were taught, through lectures based in textbooks. This situation could change, and students' understanding of research practice could be fostered relatively easily, if faculty began teaching classes focused on the journal articles they read in their professional lives. In this essay, I outline a novel scaffolded approach to guiding students in a) deciphering the complexities of scientific literature and b) the process of gaining new understanding of who scientists are, what they do, how they do it, and why.

Do graduate students’ teaching values align with their approaches to teaching and teaching practices?

“…Graduate-student instructors may also choose to assign textbooks because they assume that textbooks better match the academic level of the students to a greater extent than scholarly or popular press articles. Whereas large numbers of unfamiliar, disciplinary-specific words can make scholarly articles challenging, there are strategies that can be used to help undergraduates avoid feeling overwhelmed or frustrated (Osborne et al, 2016; see Brosowsky & Parshina, 2017; Brosowsky, Parshina, Locicero, & Crump, 2020; Grose-Fifer & Davis-Ferreira, 2018; Hoskins, 2019; van Lacum, Koeneman, Ossevoort, & Goedhart, 2016). However, graduate student instructors may not have been trained in these strategies and thus may avoid assigning scholarly articles.…”

Reading Primary Scientific Literature: Approaches for Teaching Students in the Undergraduate STEM Classroom

“…Since then, the authors and others have revised and implemented the CREATE method in different contexts, with many publications discussing modifications of this approach, assessment of students’ cognitive and affective changes, as well as ways to train and support faculty in implementing this technique ( Hoskins et al. , 2007 , 2017 ; Hoskins, 2008 , 2010 , 2019 ; Gottesman and Hoskins, 2013 ; Stevens and Hoskins, 2014 ; Hoskins and Krufka, 2015 ; Hoskins and Gottesman, 2018 ; Kenyon et al. , 2016 , 2019 ; Hsu, 2020 ; Krufka et al.…”

Using CREATE and Scientific Literature to Teach Chemistry

“…6 Our findings further support reports that the CREATE process, in which students creatively apply a diverse range of tasks to learn about scientific studies and propose their own experiments, can increase students' self-efficacy with respect to science process skills. 31,35 We further postulate that after taking a CREATE course, students are better prepared to become part of a research lab setting and work collaboratively with other scientists. Future efforts could involve longitudinal studies to assess outcomes of students who take the CREATE course described here.…”