Introducing Undergraduate Students to Primary Research Literature in a Human Anatomy and Physiology Course
Authors: Knight Sarah F. , Ma Hongmei 
Published: June 2021

There is growing evidence that engaging students in critical evaluation of primary literature increases critical thinking skills and exposes students to aspects of scientific inquiry that aren't covered in textbooks. We found that our upper‐level undergraduate students had previously had limited exposure to primary research literature, therefore we decided to study the effect of increasing student interaction with primary scientific research articles. The primary research articles were chosen to also expose students to subject matter relevant to the content of the course.

This study was carried out during the first semester of a two‐semester undergraduate Human Anatomy and Physiology course. Students taking this course intend to go on to graduate programs in nursing, medicine, to become physician assistants as well as pursue careers in public health. Primary research articles were chosen by the instructor and made available to the students a few weeks before the respective discussions. We required groups of 3 students to prepare a short presentation highlighting major points of a primary research article, on a topic related to that being covered in class. The group of students also wrote 5 questions for the class to consider while reading the article and lead an in‐class discussion. All students not leading the discussion were required to read the articles and review the questions posted 3 days before class. The duration of article discussions was between 15–30 minutes. At the end of the semester to assess the impact of our study we asked 29 students to complete an anonymous questionnaire on their perception of the exercise.

Students answered six questions using the Likert scale, categorizing their answers between 1–5, where 1 = not at all and 5 = extremely. Just 41% of students reported having previous exposure to primary research literature before enrollment in this course and 34% of students felt confident in leading a discussion of a research article at the start of the semester. Interestingly 69% of students reported increased confidence in discussing primary literature by the end of the semester compared with at the start. Of students polled 79% found the exercise challenging, 89% thought it would be useful in their future careers but just 41% of students found the exercise enjoyable.

As a result of incorporating primary research articles into our course we observed an increase in student confidence in discussing research literature after a single semester. The majority of our students however did not enjoy this exercise, but they did feel that it was an important skill to develop for their future careers. The moderate increase in confidence of our students in discussing primary research literature was somewhat disappointing. In the future we aim to build upon the growth of student confidence significantly and to increase student enjoyment and satisfaction in the exercise.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.