Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills

Feldon, David F.; Peugh, James; Timmerman, Briana Eileen; Maher, Michelle; Hurst, Melissa; Strickland, Denise; Gilmore, Joanna; Stiegelmeyer, C.

doi:10.1126/science.1204109

Cited by 183 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…This qualitative study originated as part of a larger NSF-funded study of graduate student research skill development in science, engineering, and mathematics (see Feldon et al, 2011). Within the larger study, science, engineering, and mathematics faculty who served as advisors of record for graduate student participants reported on student progress.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Flip Side of the Attrition Coin: Faculty Perceptions of Factors Supporting Graduate Student Success

Gilmore

Wofford

2016

IJDS

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Doctoral attrition consistently hovers around 50% with relevant literature identifying several mediating factors, including departmental culture, student demographics, and funding. To advance this literature, we interviewed 38 graduate faculty advisors in science, engineering, or mathematics disciplines at a research-extensive university to capture their perceptions of factors supporting graduate student success. Using a constant-comparison method, we found that faculty perceptions aligned within three major categories, termed: motivated student behaviors, formative student learning experiences, and essential student knowledge and skills. Student motivation was most prominently represented in findings. This aligns with prior studies showing that faculty tend to identify the cause of graduate student failure as lying within the students themselves and rarely discuss their role or the department's contribution to attrition. Thus findings offer an opportunity to reflect and improve upon practice. The study also highlights actions graduate students can take to increase success, such as developing collegial relationships and early involvement in research and scholarly writing. We encourage graduate faculty advisors and others to identify ways to help graduate students overcome common obstacles to enduring and succeeding within graduate programs. Faculty perceptions are also examined by discipline and faculty rank, and directions for future research are offered.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Flip Side of the Attrition Coin: Faculty Perceptions of Factors Supporting Graduate Student Success

Gilmore

Wofford

2016

IJDS

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“…Importantly, the creation of mentored teaching opportunities for our senior graduate students and postdoctoral fellows was meaningful not only for their scientific development [17] but also to allow them a professional development opportunity in education that is not as readily available on a medical campus as it might be on an undergraduate campus. The importance of professional development opportunities outside of experimental science has become increasingly essential as the diversity of students' professional goals has come to light [18,19].…”

Section: Box 3bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leading change: Curriculum reform in graduate education in the biomedical sciences

Dasgupta

Symes

Hyman

2015

Biochem Molecular Bio Educ

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The Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at the Boston University School of Medicine houses numerous dynamic graduate programs. Doctoral students began their studies with laboratory rotations and classroom training in a variety of fundamental disciplines. Importantly, with 15 unique pathways of admission to these doctoral programs, there were also 15 unique curricula. Departments and programs offered courses independently, and students participated in curricula that were overlapping combinations of these courses. This system created curricula that were not coordinated and that had redundant course content as well as content gaps. A partnership of key stakeholders began a curriculum reform process to completely restructure doctoral education at the Boston University School of Medicine. The key pedagogical goals, objectives, and elements designed into the new curriculum through this reform process created a curriculum designed to foster the interdisciplinary thinking that students are ultimately asked to utilize in their research endeavors. We implemented comprehensive student and peer evaluation of the new Foundations in Biomedical Sciences integrated curriculum to assess the new curriculum. Furthermore, we detail how this process served as a gateway toward creating a more fully integrated graduate experience, under the umbrella of the Program in Biomedical Sciences. V C 2015 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 43(2):126-132, 2015.Keywords: graduate education; curriculum reform; biomedical science; interdisciplinary; doctoral education Introduction Doctoral education has been based on an apprentice model in the biological sciences for many decades; however, even given this practical emphasis on the applied science, it has still been noted that, "We should focus less on the production of PhDs and more on the production of scientists. They are not necessarily the same thing" [1]. Certainly, the apprentice model does run the risk of producing graduates with highly specialized knowledge about their area of expertise with little appreciation of the context of their work [2]. Moreover, there has been a national call toward moving our scientific educational programs in an interdisciplinary direction, and much of the initial focus of these efforts has been at the undergraduate level [3,4]. However, a shifting funding landscape toward interdisciplinary and translational science [5] has helped to catalyze discussions on teaching science as an integrated process of inquiry that is less concerned with discipline-specific facts [6,7].As this educational movement has filtered into the arena of graduate education, a number of proposals have been put forth from encouraging curriculum fellows to develop integrated graduate courses [8,9] to developing graduate-level laboratory courses [10]. What these interventions have in common is a focus on developing interdisciplinary educational opportunities that apply to the research paradigm in which graduate students will be embedded [11][12][13]. In...

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“…They already have experience with reading and writing scientific papers and they can more easily integrate into the teams of students and mediate intragroup discussions compared to regular teachers, whose role is to coordinate the activities, moderate the final discussion and evaluate the teams' performance. Moreover, teaching experience was shown to improve graduate students' research skills [18] so their involvement in the course may be beneficial for their own careers. Another concern that needs to be taken into account stems from our observation that at the post-course assessment the students were not only better at identifying valid (intentional and unintentional) errors, but also had a tendency to identify more unsubstantiated flaws (Supporting Information S2 Table).…”

Section: Limitations Of the Coursementioning

confidence: 99%

Intentionally flawed manuscripts as means for teaching students to critically evaluate scientific papers

Ferenc

Červenák

Birčák

et al. 2017

Biochem Molecular Bio Educ

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As future scientists, university students need to learn how to avoid making errors in their own manuscripts, as well as how to identify flaws in papers published by their peers. Here we describe a novel approach on how to promote students' ability to critically evaluate scientific articles. The exercise is based on instructing teams of students to write intentionally flawed manuscripts describing the results of simple experiments. The teams are supervised by instructors advising the students during manuscript writing, choosing the 'appropriate' errors, monitoring the identification of errors made by the other team and evaluating the strength of their arguments in support of the identified errors. We have compared the effectiveness of the method with a journal club-type seminar. Based on the results of our assessment we propose that the described seminar may effectively complement the existing approaches to teach critical scientific thinking.

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Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills

Cited by 183 publications

References 20 publications

The Flip Side of the Attrition Coin: Faculty Perceptions of Factors Supporting Graduate Student Success

The Flip Side of the Attrition Coin: Faculty Perceptions of Factors Supporting Graduate Student Success

Leading change: Curriculum reform in graduate education in the biomedical sciences

Intentionally flawed manuscripts as means for teaching students to critically evaluate scientific papers

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