Reading Academic Articles

Park Bom when read a magazine on 22 November 2018 [Soure: Twitter @haroobomkum]

Becoming a critical consumer of the scientific literature is an important step in transitioning from post-secondary education into the scientific community—in and of itself an important goal. Yet there has been considerably less focus on teaching students how to read and critically evaluate academic articles.

As a science educator and scientific literacy researcher, I have been constructing indicators of competency aspects, some of which are closely related to the competence of consuming academic articles—whether in the form of proceedings or journals. Reading and comprehending academic articles are important skills for students to develop, yet many students struggle to identify and connect the essential information from academic articles. For example, the friends of my wife in the making Wahyu Eka Saputri has been struggle to identify essential informations from academic articles then connect those for their undergraduate thesis proposal.

I have been infleunced by Setiya Utari, who was my undergraduate advisor and is be my academic role model. Setiya Utari views scientific literacy as its major learning goal nor rates skills like interpreting data, writing reports, and critically analyzing academic articles among the most important for students to learn. In support of these goals, Setiya Utari assigned academic articles readings to me, e.g. Paul DeHart Hurd’s Scientific Literacy: New Minds for a Changing World, Richard R. Hake’s Interactive-Engagement Versus Traditional Methods, nor The Many Levels of Inquiry by Heather Banchi and Randy Bell.

Setiya Utari also assigned textbook readings to me, e.g. Douglas C. Giancoli’s Physics: Principles with Applications, Mary Layne Boas’ Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences, nor How to Design and Evaluate Research in Education by Jack R. Fraenkel and Norwan E. Wallen. She was, however, when asked to determine which is more important to read between textbooks or academic articles, mentioned that the last in the first place. If academic articles are to be more a useful pedagogical tool for learning specific content, students must have the basic skills required to read those sources.

Becoming a critical consumer of the scientific literature is an important step in transitioning from post-secondary education into the scientific community—in and of itself an important goal. Yet there has been considerably less focus on teaching students how to read and critically evaluate academic articles. Thus, students must learn to read academic articles in the first place.

Academic articles can be more challenging than other reading materials, like textbooks, commonly encountered by undergraduate students. Generally speaking, textbooks are written for students and academic articles are written for other experts. As a result, textbooks often provide a great deal of guidance for the reader by exploiting text structures and signaling techniques to highlight important information, however, academic articles often contain unfamiliar terms and explanatory and argumentative text structures written without non-experts in mind.

Writing style may also inspire reading style. For example, textbooks that express content as accessible units of facts may inspire a rote approach to the content, where students assume their task is to memorize details of the well-written paragraphs. By contrast, academic articles contain persuasive arguments with data and references to convince the reader of some claim. Academic articles might also inappropriately persist in applying reading strategies like rote-memorization that were previously useful for textbook readings, even though reading argumentative prose might inspire students to the task of critically evaluating the basis for claims in the article.

Students often find common assignments like summarizing an academic article to be quite challenging, because they are engaging with materials intended for an expert audience. Students struggle identifying and understanding key components of academic articles. For instance, they can have difficulty understanding the motivation and argument structure presented in an Introduction, the concepts of experimental design in the Methods, and the statistical concepts found in the Results.

In short, reading academic articles poses a unique challenge for undergraduate students. Two aspects are worth highlighting: First, students must be able to find and identify important conceptual information that may or may not be explicitly stated. For example, the author may or may not explicitly state their goal, yet the reader should be able to discern the author’s goal from the introduction of the study. Second, students must be able to understand the logical connections between important ideas, both within the context of the individual research article and in the broader context of research design and the scientific literature. For example, students should be able to identify the author’s research question, the logic of how the research design can address that question, and how the author’s conclusions relate to both.

Park Bom when read a magazine on 22 November 2018 [Soure: Twitter @haroobomkum]

When I presented my undergraduate thesis proposal in E.306 FPMIPA A of Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia on the afternoon (qubaila al-maghrib) of September 6, 2016, Setiya Utari gave ideas as her responses to me, which might be developed conceptually. In her honor for her role as a founder of this basis idea, I call it the ‘SU Method’—it will be ‘SUM’ if this is shortened it, but don’t campare with Richard Phillips Feynman's “sum over histories” theory, it just ‘Setiya Utari Method’.

In the special case, this method was used by Setiya Utari as my undergraduate thesis advisor assisted by Muhamad Gina Nugraha, to choice academic articles for my references. Setiya Utari assigned me for reading academic articles sources have typically been emphasized to identify the key conceptual information necessary to connect those for my undergraduate thesis. It is a general framework to help students identify and draw connections between the research questions being asked, how the researcher tried to answer them, and the implications of the answer.

This method asking students to examine the bigger picture. That is, rather than asking students to list facts about an article (e.g., “who was the author?”, “how many participants were in the study?”), it asks students to think about the academic article in terms of its broader goals (i.e., asking and answering questions). Additionally, this method is meant to be a simple outline that is easily remembered and can be applied more broadly to any academic article. For example, I was introduced and used when my friends e.g. Arij Zulfi Mufassaroh, Faliqul Jannah Firdausi, and Fatimah Afifatutthohiroh consulted me about their thesis.

Table 1. An outline of the SUM
Goal	What was the broad goal being aimed by this research?
	What was the specific goal being aimed by this research?
Data	What data are necessary for this research?
	What are variable of this research?
Method	What were the methods in this research?
	What was the logic of using the methods in this research?
Results	What were the important results?
	What inferences can be made base on the results?

Park Bom when read a magazine on 22 November 2018 [Soure: Twitter @haroobomkum]

Goal

All research begins with a goal (includes to finish undergradute school), and trying to result the goal is the point of conducting research. The first step to understanding any academic article is to identify the goal that were aimed by the author(s), and understand why the goal was important enough that we should care about the answer. There are often two categories of goals being aimed in general: broad and specific. Broad goals are typically too general to be aimed by any research for provide an overview of the general topic of interest (e.g., “The influence of learning model on student scientific literacy?”). Specific goals, on the other hand, can be addressed by a single research or set of researchs (e.g., “Inquiry-based learning cause student to more competence in scientific literacy?”). Aiming one or more specific goals should be considered steps made toward addressing a broad goal. Generally, to define more precisely the goal(s) to be aimed, to become clearer about exactly what the purpose of the study is, the author(s) writing research question(s). However, the question(s) not been wrote explicitly by author(s) in some academic articles, usually in the qualitative research.

Data

A good academic article will consider explanation of data related the specific goal(s) being aimeed. Each data proposed in the academic article is called a variable. The author(s) should explain why each data is plausible, usually referencing previous works. It is important to note that some studies have multiple variables, that each of these will require its own question and even instrument. Independing on the different research method, the specific data might be found early in the Method section, shortly before the broad design is introduced, or the very last paragraph of the Introduction section after the author has provided a background of the research.

Method

The methods are the details of what the author(s) did in the research that found in the Method section. The amount of methodological information included in an article can be overwhelming. As a reader, we should first determine what their goals are to identifying what level of detail we wish to learn about research methodology. We will make a distinction between having a general understanding of research design and understanding all the methodological details. Depending on our goals as a reader, a general overview may be sufficient. The reason using a method, therefore, is the general idea underlying how the research might be distinguished for aiming the goal(s). Ideally, we should be able to choose the method based on the necessary data. That is, if the data is knowed, we would list the designs to obtain each data, then we would choose that a specific design would use to the research. The reason using a method, often will not provide an overview of the research methods being applied in the academic article. From these case, we should be able to derive reason using a method.

Result

The outcome of the research will be detailed in the Results section, often summarized using descriptive measures of central tendency (means, medians, or modes) and variability (e.g., standard deviation) in quantitatvie research. These descriptive measures are usually displayed in a table or figure that provides us with an easy-to-understand summary of the results. Sometimes, the Results section can be difficult to navigate, just because there can be numerous statistical tests with many different results. We should try to identify the important results. Which statistical tests directly relate to the questions asked? For example, there might be predicted differences between specific groups or, in the case of correlational designs, predicted associations. We can try to find the statistical tests that test those specific predictions. The Results section details the results of the author’s measurements, and statistical inferences about whether differences between those measurements should be considered reliable. But what does it all mean? The real payoffs of conducting an academic article are the inferences one can draw from the results that bear on the goals aimed and help identify which of the possible conclusion are most likely to be true. Given the results, what did the authors conclude? The Discussion section will contain the inferences (note that the use of the word inference is separate from inferential statistics) the authors made about their results. Ideally, if the methodology are sound, the results should be more consistent with data that allowing the authors to comepare with previous work.

Park Bom when read a magazine on 22 November 2018 [Soure: Twitter @haroobomkum]