Primary Literature in the Classroom

A decent conference should slap me awake from the stupor that descends after a long stretch of drudgery at the bench. Right now, Genetics 2010: Model Organisms to Human Biology is having the desired effect; I feel like I'm in an ad for aftershave or sugar-free gum, with water slow-motion splashing down the aisles of the lecture hall.  However, I know the late night poster session will turn all that enthusiasm into exhaustion and cynicism, so I want to share an interesting talk from the education session before that happens.

The talk was given by Sally Hoskins, one of the designers of the CREATE methodology. This approach was developed a couple of years ago at City College of New York in an attempt to address the disconnect between students' static conceptions of science and the hodge-podge reality.  Even better, CREATE asks students to practice those skills that scientists actually value: understanding the primary literature, analyzing data, hypothesizing, proposing new experiments, and then persuading their peers to hand over great wads of cash with which to do them.

Here's how they justify their acronym:

Consider - The class is assigned a paper (without the title, abstract, or author names). At home, they use the paper's introduction to create a concept map and define the key terms.

Read - Still at home, students read the paper. They create cartoons of the experimental design and methods, fully annotate the figures, and in the case of very data rich figures, transform or split up the data into new graphs or tables.

Elucidate hypothesis - Again, still at home, students decide what hypothesis is being tested

Analyze and interpret the data - Class time is dedicated to analyzing and interpreting the data in the paper - it's run much like a lab meeting.

Think of the next Experiment - As homework, students propose two follow-up experiments.

After this, the students form multiple funding panels, peer review each other's proposed experiments and each panel chooses one proposal to fund. Then the whole process is repeated for another 4-5 papers.  Hoskins uses a temporal sequence of papers published by one lab, but I think it would be interesting to study the back and forth of work from competing labs, or across the course of a big conceptual shift in your-favourite-field. Eventually, the class compiles a list of questions to email to all of the authors of the papers they have been studying.  The questions are typically about their career path and whether they 'like being a scientist'.  Unsurprisingly, most people are pleased and flattered to have an entire undergraduate class interested in them and reply with helpful and frank responses.

A good time is clearly had by all.  But is it effective?  Based on the original course and the 8 additional CREATE courses tested on different campuses, the answer is yes, at least for critical thinking, understanding the nature of science and interest in science. The caveat is that it didn't work when only a single paper was done as a 3-week module within a larger course.

It sounds fun, right? Plus it has a nerdy acronym.