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Course in critical scientific thinking, writing pays dividends for UT graduate students |
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Jim Winkler |
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Jul 30, 2008
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University of Toledo professors Drs. Marthe Howard and Joseph Margiotta want UT graduate students to question, to raise skeptical eyebrows, and to challenge conventional wisdom to articles they read in the scientific literature.
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| Trisha Dwyer holds a copy of the neuroscience journal that will publish a review written by her, Damien Earl, left, and Liping Wang, far right. The review was the product of a course taught by Dr. Joseph Margiotta, standing, and Dr. Marthe Howard. |
The two professors, who conduct neurosciences research and mentor students in the neurosciences and neurological disorders (NND) track in the College of Medicine’s graduate programs, last year dramatically revamped a “journal club” course to help students to critically read, question, discuss and evaluate scientific papers and research with their peers — important skills as they develop as scientists.
As a result, three students — Trisha Dwyer, Damien Earl and Liping Wang — will have a review paper, “The Utility of a New In Vitro Model of the Stroke Penumbra,” published in an upcoming issue of the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience, the official periodical of the Society of Neuroscience.
The focus of the course, Journal Paper Review in Neuroscience, a requirement for master's and PhD students in the NND track, was not to teach through textbooks, but rather through primary sources like research articles in academic journals. Instead of trying to “cover the material” in a class and force-feed concepts, the course was aimed at helping students cultivate open-mindedness, reflection and a questioning attitude, and become familiar with the elements of careful reading, good writing, critical thinking and effective public speaking.
“Dr. Howard and I felt that a course should be developed to better encourage in-depth analysis, critical questioning and in-class participation,” Margiotta said. “In addition, we wanted to give our students an experience that would duplicate the challenging and collaborative aspects of modern biomedical sciences. So we decided to dramatically raise the bar, and to their credit the students responded positively.”
For starters, the students were required to justify their paper selections from neurosciences journals before the two faculty members and their classmates. Once approved, each student summarized a paper in a PowerPoint slide show, orally pinpointing its methods, results, conclusions and limitations. During the presentations, the students, Howard or Margiotta asked questions from the floor, pressing the presenters to clarify, expand or defend the author’s conclusions.
“To duplicate a real-world scenario,” Margiotta said, “students were trained to respectfully ask probing questions and the presenters to think critically on their feet in response to the friendly fire.”
The six students enrolled in the course then broke into two groups, picked a leader, and selected a different paper to critically review from the neuroscience journal, which accepts scholarly reviews, written by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, which appear in later publications of the journal.
“The students worked together on an oral presentation of the paper with each responsible for part of it,” Margiotta recalled. “The students then collaboratively prepared a critical review of the paper, and we held writing workshops where drafts of the reviews were revised and refined. Once we were all happy with the article, the students handled all of the correspondence with the journal’s editors and ensured it met all their submission requirements.”
Critical thinking, keeping an open mind to new ideas and experiences, and evaluating sources of information — knowing who researched, published and promoted a study or how qualified an “expert” are among the most important (and the hardest) long-term skills required for success in science, according to Margiotta. Graduate students need to be well-versed in critical and analytical writing so they can make persuasive arguments based on evidence and have the confidence and skills to disagree vigorously, intelligently and in a respectful spirit with colleagues.
“For students to write an excellent critical review of published work, they have to have the appropriate knowledge base related to the article they choose, be able to understand the basis of the experimental approach, be able to assess the data independent of what the authors have told them, and create their own assessment of the validity of the data, the conclusions drawn by the author and the overall contribution to the research area,” Howard noted.
“This is a valuable experience for several reasons,” said Earl, a MD/PhD student, a Salem, Ohio, native and a 2005 graduate of Kent State University. “First, critically reviewing journal articles is no easy task. It requires practice and a good training environment to become a good critical reviewer of the literature. Second, some of us, including myself, are nervous speakers. Presenting articles and being critiqued by your fellow peers is good practice and a lot less stressful than presenting to an unfamiliar audience, something which researchers frequently do. My writing and collaboration skills were also improved. Scientific writing is clear and concise, a style which I thought I had mastered, but found that I really needed to work on. Trying to write one manuscript with others can be even more difficult, since people tend to have different writing styles and different opinions as to what content should be included. We had to frequently compromise on what to write and how to write it.”
Dwyer, a Toledo native and a 2005 Bowling Green State University graduate who is enrolled in the PhD program, agreed that writing a paper with two other students with different egos and perspectives was challenging and time-consuming, but educational because the trio worked hard to ensure that everyone’s input and suggestions were considered as the paper was being written.
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