Below is a link to a poster from STS’s awesome poster session at the 2017 ALA Annual  conference with some interesting ideas about how to show students how to read primary research articles. Thanks to Rachel Hamelers of Muhlenberg College for sharing this great activity.

  1. Letting students know that they will have to come up with a reading practice – how they were doing to develop their own system for reading papers.
  2. Set up for two activities: Knowing where the information is located in an article is the first step to reading primary literature.
  3. Activity one: Have students bring in a printed out copy of the first week’s reading. Work with a partner and use whiteboards to fill in what information is in each section of a review article (abstract, intro, method, results and discussion).
  4. Activity two: Students were then given a new article and asked to find the answers to the following questions in a short amount of time: what was the question? [Find the question the researchers were trying to answer and where it is in the paper]; What did they do? [Summarize the methods the authors used]; What did they find? [Summarize the results]; How will you make this article useable to yourself in a week, month or year? [Students encouraged to come up with a framework that will work for them…]; How do you interpret the figures? [Work in smaller groups on these and then share as a class.]

 

All of the posters are here: http://acrl.libguides.com/c.php?g=687051&p=4984254

Rachel’s poster is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2hPNiaf_zmwcF91MC1nRVFheEE/view