Introducing undergraduate students to scientific reports

The question of how and when to introduce undergraduates to primary research articles is a perennial problem. We describe here a series of exercises undertaken with Level One students as introductory training towards the reading and presentation of scientific papers at Level Three and the writing up of final year research projects. In the first exercise, students consider the structure of a scientific report and read and evaluate a given research paper. Subsequently, students are asked to imagine themselves as scientific investigators interested in a specific problem. In tutor-led group discussion, they design an experiment to investigate the problem and then individually write a report based on provided data.