This series of posts presents ten simple suggestions to help you change your units or parts of your units to develop students’ research skills and competencies that you can adapt to suit your particular context.
10 easy ways
- Change an assessment to an inquiry
- Change a laboratory class to guided discovery
- Engage students in gathering or working with data
- Turn your unit of study into a conference
- Arrange for students to interview researchers
- Invite students and staff to research speed-dating
- Get students to write an abstract
- Change essays into academic articles
- Turn the class into a hypothesis-generating forum
- Create a competition
8. Change essays into academic articles
Essays are the very best way to teach students how to write in an academic way. They are excellent training for writing academic articles. But it’s clear from research on students’ awareness of research that they often don’t make the connection between what they are doing in writing an essay and what academics do when they do research.
The simplest way to change students’ views about research is to frame the essay as a research activity. However since students don’t always make the connection, it’s important to explicitly refer to the similarity of essay writing and academic article writing, to talk about issues you have had when your articles have been reviewed, things like, unclear focus, argument not clear etc. You could change the assignments students have to do from “Essay on…” to “Academic research article on….” Or you could break up an essay into component parts for progressive assignments, e.g. write an abstract; write a conclusion to an article. You could give students an article from which the abstract or conclusion has been omitted and ask them to write an abstract (see Number 7). But remember always to make explicit in your instructions and feedback the link with research articles.
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