Teaching Undergraduates to Understand Published Research Through Structured Practice in Identifying Key Research Concepts

Comprehension of empirical research is important for undergraduate students in scientific domains. The American Psychological Association's (2013) guidelines state that information literacy is a key learning indicator for the undergraduate psychology majors. Such literacy includes being able to read and summarize psychological sources and interpret statistical findings. Scientific inquiry and critical thinking are important goals for psychology majors, yet students often show difficulty with understanding multiple components of research articles. In previous work (Kershaw, Lippman, & Fugate, 2018), we developed instructional scaffolds that implemented deliberate and distributed practice through a series of structured assignments to build students' skills in identifying key research concepts and summarizing complex ideas from published research articles. These instructional scaffolds improved performance on 2 assessments of research article comprehension: a multiple-choice (JAC) test and a summary task. In the current work, we manipulated the dosage, or amount of practice that students completed, by varying the number of structured assignments (4 vs. 10 vs. 30). We found that all students showed improvement on both the JAC test and the summary task. Our findings suggest improvement in research article comprehension can occur after a relatively small number of practice sessions. We discuss the theoretical implications for how dosage affects learning and make practical suggestions for using research articles in instruction.