Teaching students to read journal articles critically

Abstract

In this article, the author describes the use of primary literature readings in an upper-division undergraduate field course. One of the two main learning goals of the course was to teach students how to read academic articles in economics with a critical eye. This was accomplished by providing students with a structured framework for summarizing the main methods and results of each paper and feedback provided on short written reports and during in-class discussion activities. Based on his experiences in this course, the author offers observations and suggestions to instructors wishing to integrate non-textbook academic readings in their teaching.

Keywords:

• Academic writing
• active learning
• critical thinking
• primary literature

JEL CODES:

• A2; A22

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Michael Lovenheim and Douglas McKee for the opportunity to design a unique readings-based undergraduate course and is further indebted to Douglas McKee for sharing his teaching materials, providing advice, and ongoing support. The author is grateful to Anna McDougall for her helpful comments. Finally, he thanks his students in the spring 2020 Economics of Migration course for their hard work and positive attitude even in the face of pandemic-precipitated disruption in regular teaching and the switch to online instruction.

Notes

1 Learning Goal 1 covers the first two levels (remembering and understanding) in revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) and Learning Goal 2 covers levels four and five (analyzing and evaluating).

2 In the department at this institution, this requirement is fulfilled by completing either a course in applied econometrics or a course in (theory-intensive) econometrics.

3 This part of the activity did, in some cases, extend for a bit longer if the discussion was sufficiently lively.

4 Scaffolding is an instructional technique that aims to reduce the students’ cognitive load. It involves breaking down a complex task into smaller, more familiar components. For example, in the econometrics context, instead of directly asking a student one question (for example, whether they would reject or fail to reject a hypothesis of a null effect for an OLS coefficient), you would first explicitly ask them what the standard error of the coefficient is, what the t-statistic for the hypothesis test is, and what the relevant critical values are.

5 While, in my experience, offering an article list rather than an open search might be the better option for the students’ first literature review, this aspect of how readings were handled in the course may be more difficult to implement for a course with a large number of students/groups.

6 This worked well in a small-enrollment upper-year seminar course. However, an alternative approach to dividing the literature review presentation responsibilities and maintaining the peer-instruction component would be requiring students to present an article that another group member wrote up. This ensures equal levels of literature review and presentation involvement by all group members.

7 When selecting readings for the course described in this article, the textbook by Bansak, Simpson, and Zavodny (2015) came as a highly valuable resource.

8 Of course, the methods that an instructor would want to introduce would differ by the field being taught and what is covered in other undergraduate courses at their institution. For example, the course described in this article has covered the use of ordered probit models, multinomial logit models, and shift-share (Bartik) instruments, as these are methods commonly encountered in immigration (and, more generally, applied microeconomics) literature, that are not a part of the core undergraduate statistics/econometrics courses at this institution.

9 If the course does not utilize pre-assigned groups, students can be allocated to small groups randomly, but preferably ahead of the class, as it would save on organizational time in class.

10 In this case, the homework assignment would need to include the scaffolding for reading the assigned paper, highlighting its main elements.