0.8 Manual for writing mentors  (Page 3/11)

As they plan their papers, tell them to

• Organize the paper to show the answers to their own questions
• Explain whether the key terms in the article seemed to be defined in the way they heard them in class (they should be applying knowledge as they write)
• Have fun while they write—enjoy being part of the community that evaluates scientific or engineering issues

When you consult, develop students' reading skills as follows:

• Start by discussing low-level information vs. high-level hierarchies and subordination of ideas. What's the main point of the article? How is it organized? What questions must be answered to accomplish the authors' purposes? What questions are answered first, second, and so on?

• Ask students whether the article has the qualities they want in their own papers:An excellent article will :

• Set up a context that shows why the issue to be studied matters in the field
• State its focus clearly early on
• Explain the work of previous investigators
• Describe its methods and theoretical assumptions clearly
• Present results convincingly, discussing their relevance and linking them to the theories and assumptions presented earlier
• Draw reasonable, sometimes limited conclusions
• Look forward to the next steps and future research remaining

Strategies to help students reading scientific articles

Reading a scientific article is a complex task. The worst way to approach this task is to treat it like the reading of a textbook—reading from title to literature cited, digesting every word along the way without any gross assessment of the document, without reflection, without a critical eye. Rather, the reader should begin by skimming the article to identify its structure and features. Advise students to look for the author’s main points as they read. They should generate questions before, during, and after reading, and draw inferences from the article based on their own experiences and knowledge. And to really improve understanding and recall, readers should take notes as they read. These strategies, discussed in more detail below, will help students read, comprehend, and summarize their chosen articles.

Strategy 1: skim the article and identify its structure

Most journals use a conventional structure: an Abstract followed by Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Each of these sections normally contains easily recognized conventional features, and if you read with an anticipation of these features, you will read an article more quickly and comprehend more.

Features of Abstracts

Abstracts usually contain at least four kinds of information:

• purpose or rationale of study (why they did it)
• methodology (how they did it)
• results (what they found)
• conclusion (what it means)

Most scientists read the abstract first. Others—especially experts in the field—skip right from the title to the visuals (figures and tables) because the visuals, in many cases, tell the reader what kinds of experiments were done and what results were obtained. Students should probably begin reading a paper by reading the abstract carefully and noting the four kinds of information outlined above. They should next preview the visuals and then move to the rest of the paper.