University Events

Description: Trina Kershaw, Psychology

Comprehension and analysis of published research are important skills to develop because they teach students about the processes and products of science. While many undergraduate courses in Psychology include published research articles as readings, students are frequently assigned to just summarize the articles. Students often make comprehension mistakes when summarizing because research articles are written for an expert audience. In this talk, I will describe an instructional scaffold I have developed to assist students in their understanding of the structure and content of empirical research articles. I will explain how this instructional scaffold has been implemented in my Psychology courses and describe learning outcomes that have been assessed with a research article comprehension measure that is separate from course assignments. I will present data showing improvement in comprehension in my courses, in contrast to control courses who completed the same assessments but who did not receive the instructional scaffold. In addition, I will show how the improvement in comprehension transfers to other skills, such as writing summaries and critiquing research articles. Finally, I will describe how this scaffold and assessment can be modified for introductory courses in Psychology and other courses that include empirical readings.