A successful scientist combines skill, creativity, and the art of persuasion to excel in his or her field of study. Critically important for the professional scientist is the ability to not only conduct research, but also to conceive a project and obtain funding to support research goals. As students grow in their scientific process skills over the course of their training, they are often surprised by the structures and processes used by professional scientists to procure funds for their work. We describe a semester-long experience in which students engage the process of science to design an innovative research plan on a topic that is relevant to the scientific community and society. Research teams seek funding to pursue a novel, high-impact research question, and submit proposals for peer review in a mock NSF-style study section. The module design uses a scaffolded series of writing and peer review activities, and culminates in a Pecha Kucha event in which students orally pitch and defend their proposal and vote for the best in session. The module may be scaled and adapted to suit a wide range of contexts where proposal writing and peer review is emphasized.

To prepare biology undergraduates to be able to read and evaluate the primary literature, it is beneficial to teach students how to write documents in the style of professional science style manuscripts. By breaking manuscripts into individual section assignments, we can distribute instruction across a four-year undergraduate curriculum to scaffold writing practice mastery. These skills are aided by peer review, writing tutor instruction, and assignment repetition. Students gain not only competency in writing about the discipline, but can better understand and critically evaluate the written work of others. The science writing and communication skills gathered over the course of this curricular framework provide all students with expertise in accessing science themselves and disseminating science to others.

Reading primary scientific literature enhances students’ understanding of material, increases their self-efficacy, and critical thinking skills. However, scientific articles often present multiple challenges to the students, the first among them is the unfamiliar nature of scientific texts: their high information density, formal language, and abundance of scientific jargon. In this lesson, students are taught the Talking to the Text method to metacognitively read scientific texts. The Talking to the Text method, which is part of the Reading Apprenticeship approach, enables students to have a metacognitive conversation with a scientific text, annotating it with their own questions, connections to previous knowledge, predictions, and drawings. The method is introduced through instructor’s modeling, individual practice, peer interactions, and class discussions. The collaborative approach of this lesson normalizes the struggles that students face when reading complex scientific texts. We have successfully used the Talking to the Text method in an introductory biology course with diverse students who often do not have experience in reading dense scientific texts. We find that this method promotes inclusion and holds students accountable to address what they do not understand in the text. In a survey, half of the students indicated that they were still using the method at the end of the semester. Students commented that the method improved their understanding of concepts, built their metacognitive skills, and helped them connect new information with what they already know. We believe that this method can be valuable for all students who are starting to read complex scientific texts.

Primary Image: Using Talking to the Text to metacognitively read scientific literature. A student reads a scientific text using the Talking to the Text method. The student engages in metacognitive conversation with the text by identifying the confusing parts of the text, making connections between new and existing knowledge, and drawing pictures of concepts or experiments.