In a journal club, you create a kind of community of practice within the classroom where student groups read primary scientific literature and present it back to their classmates. Through this practice, the students gain scientific literacy skills, see examples of and practice scientific communication, build topical content and protocol understanding and get to see firsthand how science is a living, evolving process that they can contribute to.
Ideally, the articles instructors choose show protocols and techniques that their students are learning as well as demonstrate how the concepts they are researching are connected to other real world applications and an evolving field of science. Faculty that explicitly teach their students strategies and skills for building scientific literacy (e.g. breaking down jargon) and allow for repeated practice tend to be the most successful.
Through journal clubs instructors also bring students into the larger community of practice of biology. The journal club taps directly into the current practices of science, and brings that evolving knowledge to the student. Since the journal article is a mechanism for scientists to communicate with one another, the student becomes a proxy scientist by engaging with the article. It is as if the student can eaves drop on a “conversation” between the experts in the field. This helps the student to identify themselves as a scientist within a larger community of practice, both in their own classroom and the larger related scientific field.
The lab notebook is the primary record of the research process. It is an organizational tool, serves as an archive of process and protocol and can even be a legal document that protects intellectual property rights. Keeping a lab notebook is a standard requirement in professional research and one that has many learning benefits for students. The lab notebook teaches project management skills such as attention to detail and organization as well as critical thinking and problem solving skills when well documented protocols can illuminate errors and can then be altered and improved. On the most practical level, the lab notebook is maintained with the idea that either the student (later in time) or someone else must be able to read and understand what they have done. The more readable and complete the notebook is the more useful it is. Students are required to record not only exactly what they did, their materials and methods, but also to document their thinking and logic, questions and observations. This serves as a document of their research process as well as their thinking and learning process which can be used for retrospective reflection and self-correction. This aspect of the lab notebook works in tandem with the Self-Assessment course component.
Self-Assessment is an evaluation of the student’s learning process and quality of work related to a specific task and an objective standard or rubric. The student performs this evaluation of themselves individually, comparing the instructors’ expectations outlined in a rubric to their work. They are prompted to use this exercise to reflect on their quality of work, effort, or level of understanding, and then to address any shortcomings or issues they identify. It is meant to promote meta-cognition, or higher order thinking which involves practicing active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning and has been shown to be a critical component of successful learning—especially in the sciences. Students use self-assessment to regulate and oversee their own learning process and evaluate their own learning outcomes. It promotes internal validation and internally motivated problem solving or improvements in quality of work to reach the expected standard. This increases student ownership of their learning process.
Last Updated June 16, 2017