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

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. Sentenceby-sentence comparisons were made within each group and the data were analyzed; the composite picture fr...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mark Gallo, Vincent Rinaldo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Society for Microbiology 2012-09-01
Series:Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education
Subjects:
Online Access:http://jmbesubmissions.asm.org/index.php/jmbe/article/view/493
Description
Summary: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. Sentenceby-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.
ISSN:1935-7877
1935-7885